Morphological criteria to identify faecal pellets of sympatric ungulates in West African savanna and estimates of associated error
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Indirect surveys may prove to be useful tools in complementing classical direct counts when monitoring ungulate populations and may also promote better understanding of the precise structure and functioning of the rich ungulate communities of African savannas. However, the identification of faecal pellets can be difficult where several sympatric species occur. This study develops simple field criteria for distinguishing between pellets among ten sympatric West African ungulates. A discriminant analysis was performed, using the mean of measurements of pellet groups from different species to pinpoint and characterize the most useful morphological criteria for separation between them. The mean diameter of pellets within each pellet group proved to be the most valuable variable for species segregation, whilst the second axis separated species by mean indent depth. The pellet groups of six of the ten designated species could be identified with a minimum misclassification error. However, no simple morphological variables emerged to permit discrimination between hartebeest and topi, or between bushbuck and Bohor reedbuck pellets. Once pellet groups have been identified, their density and spatial distribution may provide useful information on the use of space and habitat of sympatric species, over given periods.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".