Do animals select habitat at small or large scales? An experiment with meadow voles (Microtus pennsylvanicus)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Habitat and patch use are crucial to the dynamics of populations and the structure of ecological communities. But ecologists have not rigorously tested whether animals choose habitat at small or large scales. If individuals base their patch and habitat choices on fine-scale differences in habitat, then their use of different sites should correspond with measures of microhabitat at those sites. But if individuals use density to assess and respond to habitat at larger spatial scales, then site use should correspond with the scale of density-dependent habitat selection. We tested these predictions with experiments that measured microhabitat and monitored the use of capture sites by meadow voles ( Microtus pennsylvanicus Ord, 1815) in 0.25 ha old-field enclosures. We varied the density of voles in pairs of adjacent enclosures and tested for density-dependent habitat selection. Then we assessed whether their frequency of captures at trapping stations was best predicted at the small scale of microhabitat or at the much larger scale of enclosures where density varied. The voles selected habitat at different scales. When the use of enclosures was predicted by density, the scale of density-dependent choice trumped the use of small-scale patches. And when voles selected amongst different small-scale patches, their use of enclosures was independent of density. These results suggest that assessments of spatial scale in habitat use must include tests for both scale- and density-dependent habitat choice.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".