Synchrony between caribou calving and plant phenology in depredated and non-depredated populations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Two main hypotheses have been proposed to explain reproductive synchrony exhibited by many species of large herbivores: the predation hypothesis and the seasonality hypothesis. Although examples supporting both hypotheses have been presented, no study has compared the intraseasonal progression of parturition and plant phenology in depredated and non-depredated populations of large herbivores. We monitored, on a daily or near-daily basis, the progression of the caribou (Rangifer tarandus) calving seasons in two populations: the Caribou River population in Alaska, U.S.A., where predators of caribou are present and the Kangerlussuaq-Sisimiut population in West Greenland where such predators have been absent for approximately 4000 years. Simultaneously, we quantified directly the phenological progression of caribou forage plants on spatially replicated plots in both study sites. Parturition was significantly more synchronous in the West Greenland (predator-free) population than in the Alaskan (depredated) population. Progression of the calving seasons in both populations was highly synchronized to the progression of forage plant phenology, and the slopes of these relationships were statistically indistinguishable, with 50% of births having occurred when approximately 60%70% of forage plant species were emergent. These results document clear synchronization of the timing of parturition by caribou to plant phenology, regardless of predation pressure.
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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".