Impacts of vehicle traffic on the distribution and behaviour of rutting elk, Cervus elaphus
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Even within protected areas, human disturbance has the potential to influence the distribution, behaviour and, ultimately, abundance of other species. We studied the potential disturbance caused by the presence and movement of vehicle traffic on the distribution and behaviour of elk (Cervus elaphus) during the fall rut in a Canadian National Park where people congregate on a single road to observe elk. To determine the effect of vehicle traffic on elk, we subjected the road to alternating open and closed treatments of 3 or 4 days in duration. We then used a global positioning system (GPS)-linked laser range finder and a computer programmed as an event recorder to collect information on the distribution and behaviour of elk. These methods made it possible to link the precise positions of both elk and vehicles with behavioural states, which we measured with a combination of focal animal, all-occurrence, and scan sampling. We detected no effects of road closure on the distribution of elk herds or the size, cohesion, or position of separate elk groups, but elk were more likely to cross the road when it was closed. In addition, higher proportions of female elk were vigilant in the vicinity of moving vehicles and elk of both sexes, but particularly males, spent more time in vigilance postures when the road was open. Males spent less time exhibiting reproductive behaviour (sparring and mating) when the road was open and tended to spar farther from the road. Together, these results suggest that vehicle traffic exerted a measurable effect on the behaviour, but not distribution, of elk at this site. These behavioural effects are probably biologically slight, but they could easily be lessened at this site, and potentially others, by limiting the frequency and extent of vehicle movement on the road.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 it