Capercaillie broods in pristine boreal forest in northwestern Russia: the importance of insects and cover in habitat selection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus L., 1758), the largest and most size-dimorphic species of grouse, is decreasing in number throughout its man-modified range in the boreal forests of the Palaearctic. Poor reproduction owing to direct and indirect effects of commercial forestry is considered a main cause of the decline. We studied brood habitats in a pristine forest in northwestern Russia to identify key elements in habitat selection in the natural environment of this species. We monitored the movement of 10 radio-marked broods during their first 7 weeks of life, and compared the abundance of insects and cover at their locations (N = 120) with nearby random control sites. The broods preferentially used moist spruce forest and the insect-rich herb spruce forest, but were most often located in the more abundant vaccinium spruce forest, which was richest in bilberry (Vaccinium myrtillus L.) and associated lepidopteran larvae. Brood locations were consistently richer in insects than random controls in 3 of the 4 habitat types studied. The most pronounced difference was in the density of lepidopteran larvae, a food source known to form an important part of the diet of young capercaille chicks. Broods continued to select insect-rich sites throughout the 7 week age period; in the preferred moist spruce forest, larval abundance increased at brood locations, while it remained constant at control sites. Compared to the distribution of insects, cover did not appear to be as an important determinant of brood habitat selection, possibly because the structural characteristics were rather similar among the most widely used habitat types. Shrub cover tended to be higher at brood locations than at controls, whereas vertical cover along the ground was not different. This relationship to cover factors may reflect an adaptation to avoid predation by goshawk (Accipiter gentilis (L., 1758)), the most important predator of grouse in this pristine boreal forest.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".