How artificial feeding for tourism‐watching modifies black bear space use and habitat selection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Artificial feeding stations often are established to attract and habituate wildlife species to facilitate their observation, but this activity is controversial because of its potential negative impact on wildlife and, in some cases, threat to human safety. Bear managers have few empirical data to establish guidelines for bear‐watching sites. The objective of our study was to compare behaviors of black bear ( Ursus americanus ) with access to a highly‐predictable artificial food source established for tourist‐watching purposes ( n = 11) and control bears ( n = 16) in the boreal forest of Quebec, Canada. We hypothesized that fed bears would have lesser movement rates and smaller home‐range sizes than control bears, and that they would exhibit lower selection of habitat types providing abundant natural food resources (agricultural lands, regenerating, and disturbed stands) because they visit fewer food patches to meet their energy requirements. We also predicted that behavioral differences between fed and control bears would be most obvious during the period of hyperphagia (late summer and fall) when bears increase their food intake. Between 2008 and 2011, we located fed bears <1 km away from the feeding station 22.3 ± 3.7%, 48.5 ± 6.2%, and 55.9 ± 5.0% of the time in spring, summer, and fall seasons. Annual and seasonal ranges of control bears were 2.1 to 7.1 times larger than fed bears, except during the spring when bears often increased travel to access females for reproduction. Moreover, fed bears modified their movement pattern and selected vegetation types with abundant natural food resources to a lower degree, especially in the fall. Our results show that a well‐supplied feeding station can attract and sustain many bears, even in relatively poor bear habitat, leading to a local increase in bear density that might exceed the social carrying capacity. Considering the use of space by fed bears, we recommend avoiding establishing feeding stations <11.5 km from locations where human‐bear interactions should be limited (i.e., recreation sites, cabins, etc.). Behaviors adopted by fed bears were energetically profitable as evidenced by their approximately 40% greater body masses compared to control bears, suggesting the potentially positive influence of a feeding station on local population dynamics. We hope our results will increase awareness of wildlife managers about the impacts of feeding bear for tourism purposes. © 2014 The Wildlife Society.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".