Proximity to Hibernacula and Road Type Influence Potential Road Mortality of Snakes in Southwestern Saskatchewan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The behaviour of snakes makes them vulnerable to road mortality, which may have conservation implications for some species. We examined factors affecting road mortality of snakes around Grasslands National Park of Canada (GNP), Saskatchewan, an area inhabited by a unique snake community within Canada, including the threatened Eastern Yellow-bellied Racer (Coluber constrictor flaviventris). Systematic surveys (n = 45) of roads in the Grasslands National Park area in 2009 yielded 36 dead and 18 live snakes. Multivariate modelling revealed that proximity to hibernacula was positively correlated with presence of snakes on roads. Paved roads had disproportionately higher numbers of snake mortalities, suggesting that traffic patterns are a bigger risk factor than road use per se. Some radio-tracked Eastern Yellow-bellied Racers (2 of 17; 12%) and Bullsnakes (Pituophis catenifer sayi) (4 of 5; 80%) captured at emergence from hibernacula had road areas in their home ranges. These individuals equipped with radio-transmitters used roads and immediately adjacent areas significantly more than expected, based on their availability, suggesting possible selection for roads. Strategies to reduce road mortality of snakes should focus on key stretches of roads, such as those near winter hibernacula or riparian zones. The placement of paved roads in sensitive areas like those in and around Grasslands National Park should be carefully considered to minimize snake mortality.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".