Impacts from Winter-Early Spring Elk Grazing in Foothills Rough Fescue Grassland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Foothills rough fescue (Festuca campestris) grasslands provide important foraging habitat for wildlife and livestock in the northwestern United States and southwestern Canada. Foothills rough fescue is sensitive to grazing during late spring —early summer but is believed to be more tolerant of grazing during winter—early spring. We evaluated vegetation and soil impacts from long-term winter—early spring grazing at 2 intensities (HG = heavy grazing, LG = light grazing). We studied a foothills rough fescue grassland in west central Montana, USA, that had been grazed almost exclusively by Rocky Mountain elk (Cervus elaphus nelsoni ) during winter—early spring for 58 years. Foothills rough fescue tolerated LG but not HG, whereas bluebunch wheatgrass (Pseudoroegneria spicata) and Idaho fescue (Festuca idahoensis) did not tolerate either LG or HG. Decreased productivity of foothills rough fescue in HG was accompanied by decreased herbaceous ground cover and increased abundance of the invasive dense clubmoss (Selaginella densa). Soil nutrient status (OM, C, N, C:N ratio) did not differ between HG and LG; however, soil bulk density was 18% greater in HG, and the Ah horizon was 20% thinner in HG. Overall, our results indicate that long-term elk grazing during winter—early spring degraded this terrestrial ecosystem, and we conclude that periodic rest from ungulate grazing during winter— early spring is necessary to sustain foothills rough fescue grasslands.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
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".