Synchronous Variation and Long‐Term Trends in Two Populations of Black Rat Snakes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Synchronous variation among animal populations affects the vulnerability of endangered species and is relevant to understanding population fluctuation generally. We analyzed data collected over 18 years from two populations of black rat snakes ( Elaphe o. obsoleta ), a species of conservation concern in Canada, to determine whether the populations varied synchronously. Because the populations were 30 km apart and genetically distinct, synchrony should be attributable to common stochastic environmental factors, the Moran effect. Synchronous variation in annual estimates of population size, survival probability, recruitment, and age structure all provided evidence of a Moran effect. However, opposite trends in age structure through time suggested that the internal dynamics of the two populations were different. The conservation implication of synchrony is that this population of rat snakes is vulnerable to stochastic environmental phenomena because all subpopulations could become rare simultaneously. Evidence of different population processes in the two populations suggests, however, that local factors may be of more immediate relevance to conservation than regional phenomena. More generally, these results indicate that evidence of synchronous variation in population size and similar long‐term population trends—both populations appeared to be declining—are not necessarily indicative of common underlying population dynamics.
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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 | 0.000 |
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".