Loss of nesting sites is not a primary factor limiting northern Chimney Swift populations
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 Aerially‐foraging insectivorous bird populations have been declining for several decades in North America and habitat loss is hypothesized as a leading cause for the declines. Chimney Swifts ( Chaetura pelagica ) are a model species to test this hypothesis because nest site use and availability is easily assessed. To determine if nest site availability is a limiting factor for Chimney Swifts, we established a volunteer‐based survey to inventory and describe chimneys ( n = 928) that were used or unused by swifts. A logistic regression model showed that swifts preferred chimneys with a greater length exposed above the roofline and greater inside area, which were not associated with residential buildings. The average chimney used by swifts extended 2.86 m above the roofline with an internal area of 10,079 cm 2 . The regression model represents the range of nest‐site conditions that swifts will tolerate; this was used to build a linear discriminant function (ldf) that had an I ‐index of 82 % (measure of prediction success). We applied the ldf coefficients to predict chimney occupancy in three southern Ontario communities. Of 366 open chimneys, the ldf classified 139 as suitable but only 24.4 % were occupied by swifts. Given that >75 % of suitable sites were unoccupied, swifts are likely not experiencing competition from habitat saturation. Our results suggest that Chimney Swift populations, and likely other aerially‐foraging insectivorous birds, are limited primarily by other processes not measured in this study, such as changes in prey.
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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) | 0.002 | 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