Seasonal changes in territory use by red squirrels, <i>Tamiasciurus</i> <i>hudsonicus</i>, and responses to food augmentation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Traditionally, the importance of food availability and intruder pressure on habitat use have been investigated through their influences on territory size. Food-augmentation studies are more prevalent; however, they are potentially confounded by the indirect effect of conspecific attraction to local food additions. Frequent ambiguous results may be attributed to the scale of investigation. Furthermore, such investigations have not considered potential seasonal influences. In this study, controlled experimental manipulations of food availability and conspecific density were performed within red squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) territories in Algonquin Park, Ontario, to tease apart the relative importance of direct and indirect effects of food augmentation. Effects were investigated at two levels of scale, using territory size and giving-up densities (GUDs) within activity locations as response variables. Augmenting food, with or without simultaneously removing conspecifics, did not influence territory size. However, territory size decreased in control and treatment groups following manipulations, which is suggestive of seasonal influences associated with caching behaviour and midden defence. Despite overwhelming seasonal influences, GUDs were more sensitive to treatments, revealing that competitors had a greater influence on habitat use than the direct effect of food addition. Ambiguous results of previous studies may due to the use of territory-size estimators that are insensitive to responses occurring at smaller scales.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".