Habitat selection by river otters (Lontra canadensis) under contrasting land-use regimes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Habitat preferences of river otters ( Lontra canadensis (Schreber, 1777)) are well known, but because most studies were conducted in regions with markedly low or high levels of anthropogenic disturbances, it is not well known how their habitat usage is affected by varied anthropogenic disturbances and land-use regimes on a regional scale. We studied habitat use by otters in eastern New Brunswick, Canada, in an area having both protected and disturbed riparian habitats. Using long-range winter riparian transects, we documented activity-sign distribution along riverbanks in relation to 12 habitat factors and 9 categories of anthropogenic disturbances. We documented variables at site with activity signs and at habitat stations along riverbanks at 500 m intervals. We used logistical regressions and Akaike’s information criterion in an information–theoretic approach to compare models and determine the important factors involved. Habitat-related factors were more important than anthropogenic ones in describing habitat use. The best performing models were those incorporating both habitat and anthropogenic factors. Beaver ( Castor canadensis Kuhl, 1820) ponds were the most important habitat factor, while fields were the most important anthropogenic factor. Our results indicate that otters responded mostly to the presence of habitat features they use and secondarily to the presence of anthropogenic structures or activities in an area.
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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".