Unveiling the Limitations of Scat Surveys to Monitor Social Species: A Case Study on River Otters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: We examined the relationship between the production of sites with feces (i.e., latrines) and river otter ( Lontra canadensis ) abundance to determine whether scat surveys were adequate for monitoring relative population size for species leaving activity signs in a clumped distribution on the landscape. We conducted winter riparian transects to simultaneously monitor otter abundance via snow tracks and latrine sites along the rivers of Kouchibouguac National Park and surrounding area in New Brunswick, Canada. Our data showed that latrine abundance poorly reflected otter abundance for given stretches of rivers because the relationship was nonlinear and reached a plateau. The number of latrine sites was not related to the time period since last snowfall, which indicated that otters repetitively defecated at the same sites. Individual otters and groups did not produce activity signs over larger distances as a function of time, which indicated that they tend to stay in their home ranges in winter. We discuss why scat survey protocols based on determining presence—absence of a species at predetermined search sites may poorly reflect population size, as well as population fluctuations in time. Caution is advised when interpreting data from such surveys for species for which feces or other activity signs surveyed play a role in intraspecific communication and tend to be in a clumped distribution on the landscape.
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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 | 0.003 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".