Evaluating Residual Tree Patches as Stepping Stones and Short‐Term Refugia for Red‐Legged Frogs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Temperate pond‐breeding amphibians are vulnerable to forest fragmentation because they must access upland terrestrial sites during the nonbreeding season but are prone to desiccation in hot, dry environments without canopy cover. Harvesting techniques that retain live trees in the cut block are advocated for sustaining forest biodiversity, but the effects of these practices on amphibians are unknown. We studied red‐legged frogs ( Rana aurora ) in movement trials to assess: 1) how short‐term use of residual trees was affected by tree patch size, streams, and neighborhood features; 2) whether residual tree patches were used as stepping stones in negotiating cut blocks; 3) the effects of patch size and patch proximity in altering movement paths; and 4) the effects of retention level and patch size on interpatch distance. Residual tree patches were potentially valuable short‐term refugia but their value was size dependent. Virtually all frogs released at the base of single trees or inside small tree clusters left within 72 hours, but the proportion leaving decreased curvilinearly with increasing patch size. Frogs were less likely to leave tree patches with a running stream or where neighborhood stream density was high. Residual tree patches did not systematically alter movement paths. Frogs intercepted residual tree patches mostly at random and had to be within 5‐20 m of a tree patch before moving to it in greater proportions than expected by chance. However, amphibian movements were biased toward large (0.8 ha) patches and away from small (0.3 ha) patches 50 m away. Our results indicated that residual trees should not be retained singly but should be aggregated in groups between 0.8 ha and 1.5 ha, preferably in stream locations.
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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 | 0.002 | 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".