Into thin air: vertical migration, body condition, and quality of terrestrial habitats of alpine common toads, <i>Bufo bufo</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the end of the 1980s there has been increasing evidence of worldwide amphibian declines in high-altitude regions. Moreover, amphibian conservation has so far mostly neglected the terrestrial habitat, which is essential for effective protection measures. We determined the location and quality of terrestrial habitats of common toads (Bufo bufo L., 1758) in a naturally fragmented alpine environment (Schlumsee, 1105 m a.s.l., Northern Calcareous Alps, Austria) characterized by a high diversity of available microhabitats. By radio-tracking 18 individuals during their post-spawning migration, we located terrestrial habitats 1301000 m horizontally away from and 85390 m above the breeding site. This is the first study to show vertical migration over several hundred metres in adult amphibians. Both adult and juvenile toads completed the migration within 27 weeks and, on their way to the summer habitat, climbed 45° scree slopes and ascended cliffs with slopes of up to 65°. Body condition indices were highest for individuals originating from the terrestrial summer habitat at the highest elevation, which is characterized by the highest vegetation diversity, a high abundance of food, and the highest insolation, probably allowing the toads to extend their activity period for food intake. Our study suggests that under demanding climatic conditions it can pay off for toads to undertake costly migrations to reach high-quality habitats. For amphibian conservation, high-value habitat patches need to be located and investigated to increase the effectiveness of protection measures.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".