Reconstructing Changes in Abundance of White-tailed Deer, <em>Odocoileus virginianus</em>, Moose, <em>Alces alces</em>, and Beaver, <em>Castor canadensis</em>, in Algonquin Park, Ontario, 1860-2004
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The history of White-tailed Deer, Odocoileus virginianus, Moose, Alces alces, and Beaver, Castor canadensis, in Algonquin Park since the 1860s is reviewed and placed in the context of changes to the forest, weather, and parasitic disease. Deer seem to have been abundant in the late 1800s and early 1900s whereas Moose were also common but less so than deer. Deer declined through the 1920s as Moose probably increased. Deer had recovered by the 1940s when Moose seem to have been scarce. The deer population declined again in the 1960s, suffered major mortality in the early 1970s, and has never recovered; deer are essentially absent from the present day Algonquin landscape in winter. Moose increased steadily following the decline of deer and have numbered around 3500 since the mid-1980s. Beaver were scarce in the Park in the late 1800s but recovered by 1910 and appear to have been abundant through the early 1900s and at high numbers through mid-century. The Beaver population has, however, declined sharply since the mid-1970s. These changes can best be explained by the history of change to the structure and composition of the Park's forests. After extensive fire and logging in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the forest is now in an essentially mature state. Weather and parasitic disease, however, have also played a role. These three species form the prey base of Algonquin's Wolves, Canis lycaon, and the net decline of prey, especially deer, has important implications for the future of wolves in the Park.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".