Legacy effects of habitat degradation by Lesser Snow Geese on nesting Savannah Sparrows
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Increased growth of the midcontinental population of Lesser Snow Geese (Chen caerulescens caerulescens) has led to overgrazing and habitat degradation at their Arctic and sub-Arctic breeding grounds. This habitat degradation has been shown to induce a trophic cascade that negatively affects plant, insect, and other avian species that share these habitats. In conjunction with a long-term study of the impacts of Lesser Snow Geese on habitat, we examined the dual influences of climate and long-term habitat change on the nesting occurrence of Savannah Sparrows near Churchill, Manitoba, Canada. Using multistate occupancy models, we found that variability in early-summer temperature and precipitation modulated year-to-year variability in nesting occurrence and detection probabilities. Extreme warm and wet conditions in early summer can benefit breeding Savannah Sparrows across the landscape. However, such events have not been prevalent enough to override the ~80% decline in Savannah Sparrow nesting occurrence over 36 yr. This dramatic decline can be attributed to the legacy of Lesser Snow Goose foraging, which has led to an 84% reduction in preferred shrub habitat for nesting Savannah Sparrows. Management actions targeted at reducing Lesser Snow Goose abundance and habitat restoration will be needed to allow sympatric Savannah Sparrows and functionally similar species to recover.
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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 | 0.001 |
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".