Patterns of Mortality and Factors Influencing Survival of a Recently Restored Elk Population in Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This study examined patterns of mortality and determinants of survival among elk recently restored to four sites in Ontario, Canada (1998–2005). We predicted that: (1) elk located in release sites closer to the core of their historic range would have higher survival; (2) survival would increase as an animal's time and experience on the landscape increased; and (3) survival rates would decline as animals moved farther away from the release site. During the study, 443 elk were radiocollared and released; 218 mortalities were documented. Predation by wolves was the most important proximate cause of mortality, followed by death due to injuries from translocation and/or capture myopathy, accidents, emaciation, poaching, and Parelaphostrongylus tenuis infection. Overall, annual survival of elk across Ontario ranged from 0.45 (0.37–0.53) to 0.81 (0.66–0.90), with rates being lowest in the years immediately following release and highest in the final years of the study; this pattern was due to high initial mortality from translocation injuries and/or capture myopathy and possibly lack of familiarity with novel habitat. Model‐averaged hazards further support this finding, as the most important factor influencing elk survival was the length of holding period, with elk released after limited holding being less likely to survive than those held for longer periods. Our results suggest that mortalities caused by capture myopathy and transportation‐related injuries are important sources of risk for translocated elk. The method of introduction to the novel landscape and behavior in the first year should be accommodated via soft‐release and appropriate release areas.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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".