A Fresh Look at the Taxonomy of Midcontinental Sandhill Cranes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The midcontinental population of sandhill crane (Grus canadensis) includes about 500,000 birds and provides valuable recreational crane-watching and hunting opportunities in Canada and the United States. It comprises three subspecies, one of which (G. c. rowani) was of uncertain taxonomic status and another of which (G. c. tabida) merited protection from excessive harvest due to its small population size. We obtained measurements of cranes used by Johnson and Stewart (1973) and additional crane specimens to 1) evaluate the subspecies designation of midcontinental sandhill cranes and 2) to seek improved methods for classifying cranes from selected measurements. We found that the three named subspecies are in fact morphologically distinct, although there is a general gradient of smaller birds breeding in the far north to larger birds breeding at more southerly latitudes. We were not able to find better ways of identifying subspecies; in particular we could not find a reliable method that did not require knowledge of the sex of an individual crane.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".