Co-occurrence of reintroduced and resident ungulates on a shared winter range in northwestern Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For interspecific competition to occur species must use the same limited resources (e.g. food, habitat) and overlap in time and space. Bison (Bison bison) were reintroduced to southwestern Yukon, Canada, where they are sympatric with resident caribou (Rangifer tarandus), moose (Alces americanus) and thinhorn sheep (Ovis dalli). Concerns from local communities regarding potential competition between reintroduced bison and resident ungulates prompted us to test their spatial distribution for co-occurrence. In late-winter, we conducted multiple aerial surveys (n = 1–5) of 12.2 km2 cells (n = 779) to develop a presence–absence matrix (4 species × 779 cells) of the spatial distribution of ungulates. Randomization procedures were used to conduct a null model analysis of co-occurrence. Community-wide null model analysis indicated that community members were neither segregated nor aggregated; rather, their spatial distribution was random because they did not differ from simulated null communities (n = 50,000). Similar analyses conducted on sub-matrices for each species pair also did not find evidence for segregation or aggregation among any species pairs except caribou and sheep, who were spatially segregated. We conclude that the overall potential for competition between reintroduced bison and resident ungulates during late-winter is low, based on spatial overlap. However, further investigations on the potential for competition among other niche dimension axes (e.g. food, habitat use) are recommended. Even though bison are reintroduced, these species had interacted for thousands of years and have probably co-evolved mechanisms to partition resources and co-exist on a shared landscape.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".