Can ground counts reliably monitor ibex Capra ibex populations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Although ground counts are often used to monitor ungulate populations, several studies show that counts of ungulates have low precision and often underestimate population size. We assessed the reliability of ibex Capra ibex counts as performed in French national parks, by analysing up to 23 years of annual censuses of six ibex populations for which a subset of animals were individually marked. We compared the population growth rate obtained from census data (estimated by use of four different methods) with the growth rate calculated from a demographic model including parameters estimated from capture‐mark‐recapture methods. The correlations between count‐based estimates and growth rate obtained from demographic models were adequate to suggest that ground counts can monitor trends in population size of ibex, provided that the occasional undercounts are identified. Substantial undercounts in some years led to biologically impossible values of yearly population growth (λ>1.35) and, in the longest time series available, to marked autocorrelations in counts. Managers should replicate counts within the same year to check for underestimated counts. To reduce errors, population biologists analysing time series of ungulate counts should check the plausibility of annual growth rates estimated from two consecutive counts.
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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) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".