Diet and Habitat of Mountain Woodland Caribou Inferred from Dung Preserved in 5000-year-old Alpine Ice in the Selwyn Mountains, Northwest Territories, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alpine ice patches are unique repositories of cryogenically preserved archaeological artefacts and biological specimens. Recent melting of ice in the Selwyn Mountains, Northwest Territories, Canada, has exposed layers of dung accumulated during seasonal use of ice patches by mountain woodland caribou of the ancestral Redstone population over the past ca. 5250 years. Although attempts to isolate the DNA of known caribou parasites were unsuccessful, the dung has yielded numerous well-preserved and diverse plant remains and palynomorphs. Plant remains preserved in dung suggest that the ancestral Redstone caribou population foraged on a variety of lichens (30%), bryophytes and lycopods (26.7%), shrubs (21.6%), grasses (10.5%), sedges (7.8%), and forbs (3.4%) during summer use of alpine ice. Dung palynomorph assemblages depict a mosaic of plant communities growing in the caribou’s summer habitat, including downslope boreal components and upslope floristically diverse herbaceous communities. Pollen and spore content of dung is only broadly similar to late Holocene assemblages preserved in lake sediments and peat in the study region, and differences are likely due to the influence of local vegetation and animal forage behaviour. The 5000-year legacy of summer use of alpine ice patches by mountain woodland caribou suggests that these small, long-lived features may be important for the health of caribou populations in the Selwyn/Mackenzie Mountain range.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 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 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".