OCCURRENCE OF THE WESTERN TOAD AND ITS USE OF ‘BORROW PITS’ IN WEST-CENTRAL ALBERTA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Populations of western toad (Bufo boreas) have declined or disappeared from much of the species' range in the United States. To assess distributions and densities of the western toad in the foothills of west-central Alberta, Canada, we conducted visual surveys of 130 natural water bodies in watersheds encompassing a range of human-disturbance levels in early and late summer 2000. Encounter rates were consistently low throughout the study area (0.2 to 0.3 toads/h) and were one-tenth the rate for the co-occurring wood frog (Rana sylvatica). Pitfall trapping of breeding and non-breeding sites during 2001 and 2002 showed differences in age structures between western toad and wood frog populations and low recruitment of newly metamorphosed juveniles into western toad populations. On ponds, more toads of ≥1 y old were captured than recently emerged juveniles. The difference between the 2 age classes was greater on ‘borrow pits’ (human-created roadside ponds) than on beaver ponds, suggesting that borrow pits might be population sinks providing poor larval habitat. Borrow pits either dried prior to juvenile emergence or had oligotrophic to mesotrophic waters compared to eutrophic conditions in beaver ponds. Pond creation as a mitigation strategy or by-product of road construction may put western toad populations at risk of decline in the foothills of Alberta.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".