The Importance of Vegetation Structure and Artificial Cover for Prairie Skinks (<i>Plestiodon septentrionalis</i>) on Exurban Land
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Northern Prairie Skink (Plestiodon septentrionalis) is listed as endangered and very little is known about habitat use in this semi-fossorial lizard. Much of the research to date has occurred on provincial park lands and federal military lands. This project aimed to define Prairie Skink habitat characteristics on exurban private land, which is defined as low-density rural residential developments, 5 to 20 acres (2 to 8 ha) in size. Prairie Skink presence data were collected using visual encounter surveys in three habitat types found on eight exurban properties in southwestern Manitoba: mowed lawn, gardens–flower beds, and native prairie. At each capture site, and at three other randomly selected sites within 10 m of each capture site, we recorded percent cover of grasses, forbs, small shrubs, bare ground, litter, and cover material. To measure thermal habitat characteristics we placed iButton® temperature loggers in each of the three habitat types. Prairie Skinks were found most commonly in native prairie and were significantly more likely to be found in areas with more artificial cover material. The number of Prairie Skink captures increased significantly as cover abundance per acre increased. Vegetation height was the most important factor moderating temperature among the habitat types. Cover may also be important on properties with minimal heterogeneity in the vegetation structure. Suitable Prairie Skink habitat exists on exurban land, specifically remnant prairie and with an abundance of artificial cover material. This type of habitat could become more important as habitat conversion continues throughout the Prairie Skink's range.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".