Prey availability and foraging activity of grassland bats in relation to urbanization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In general, urbanization negatively impacts wildlife, including bats. However, most urban ecology studies have been conducted in forested biomes and responses of grassland fauna to urbanization are poorly understood. Grasslands are flat, largely treeless, and represent challenging environments to insectivorous bats, which need vertical landscape elements for roosts and often prefer to forage in clutter or along edges. Grasslands may be even less hospitable to bats where agriculture is the dominant land use, as in the Great Plains of North America where intensive pesticide use and livestock grazing are likely detrimental to insects. Compared to agricultural areas that surround them, cities in the Great Plains offer greater structural complexity and an absence of agriculture. We investigated the hypothesis that urbanization benefits bats in the Canadian Prairies by increasing access to insect prey and foraging habitat. In 2007 and 2008, we used sticky traps to sample availability of nocturnal insects, and echolocation detectors to record foraging activity by bats, in and around the city of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Our data did not support our predictions. Insect biomass and diversity were greatest in rural areas, and foraging activity by bats was influenced more by temperature than by urbanization. Although urbanization does not seem to benefit insects or their bat predators, we found no evidence that it is detrimental to bats in prairie grasslands.
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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".