Efficacy of coverboards for sampling small northern snakes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using coverboards to monitor herpetofauna is common practice, yet few studies have formally tested the efficacy of using coverboards. We tested whether using coverboards on survey plots increased the number of small snakes detected in eastern Ontario, Canada. We set up twenty 2500 m 2 plots in field and forest habitat, ten with plywood coverboards and ten without coverboards. We sampled these twenty plots systematically for small snakes, and compared the number of snakes detected on plots with coverboards to the number detected on plots without coverboards. The number of snakes detected was always higher on plots with coverboards than on plots without coverboards, to the extent that we only detected the smallest snake species on plots with coverboards. We then examined whether Storeria occipitomaculata in western Quebec, Canada prefer plywood or tin coverboards. We set up pairs of plywood and tin coverboards along transects, and monitored the use of these coverboards throughout the active season. Storeria occipitomaculata preferred tin over plywood coverboards. We confirmed that coverboards are indeed a useful tool for monitoring small snakes, and that some snakes show preferences for specific types of coverboards. We therefore suggest that researchers use an array of different types of coverboards when attempting to monitor small snake communities, or determine which coverboards are preferred by their target species in a pilot study.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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".