Winter habitat selection by a montane forest bird assemblage: the effects of solar radiation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A relationship between sunlight and bird abundance in cold climates may seem intuitive and perhaps obvious. However, there is, surprisingly, little or no evidence to support it. We investigated the effects of solar radiation on the winter abundance of insectivorous birds inhabiting a Mediterranean montane forest with a high frequency of cold, cloudless days. We censused birds by ear in 20 different forest tracts in which we simultaneously quantified a number of variables related to the availability of solar radiation, vegetation structure, arthropod abundance, and altitude. All variables related to solar radiation were reduced to a single principal component that attained high scores for south-facing transects, where many tree trunks received direct sunlight for a long period daily. The abundance of all bird species was positively related to the scores of transects on this component after the effects of vegetation structure, altitude, and prey availability were controlled for. Solar radiation was the main predictor of overall abundance and species richness of bird assemblages. Body mass and diet (insectivorous vs. mixed) explained 94.6% of interspecific variation in the strength of the relationship between solar radiation and bird abundance. We hypothesize that selecting forest sectors with a higher availability of sunlit patches allows birds to improve their winter survival by reducing the metabolic costs of thermoregulation, decreasing movement rates, and (or) increasing the time spent motionless in safe locations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".