Origins of Late-Breeding Nomadic Sedge Wrens in North America: Limitations and Potential of Hydrogen-Isotope Analyses of Soft Tissue
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The nomadic Sedge Wren (Cistothorus platensis) breeds primarily in mesic grasslands in north-central North America. Following breeding in these regions from late May to early July, however, the species then “appears” en masse in the tallgrass prairie region farther south (e.g., Missouri and Kansas) and to the east to breed again from mid-July to early August (Herkert et al. 2001). The provenance of birds appearing in late summer to breed in these areas remains unknown because of problems inherent in mark—recapture surveys. Recent studies have shown how endogenous markers may be used to infer origins of individual birds. We analyzed levels of the stable hydrogen isotope 2H (δD) from liver, muscle, and claws of Sedge Wrens from known northern breeding locations first to establish the relationships between δD in the wrens' tissue and mean δD in precipitation during the growing season (δDp ). From these relationships we derived expected values (mean and 95% CI) for three sites in Kansas and Missouri where late breeders colonized. The observed values of δD in these late breeders were primarily within the range expected for those locations, but more individuals than expected had δD values higher than expected. In addition, in birds apparently originating from north or south of Kansas and Missouri, the values of δD in claws were positively correlated with those in other tissues, in contrast to those with the “local” signal. This supports the idea that the isotopic outliers at these sites were more recent arrivals. For small-bodied birds like the Sedge Wren, however, the isotopic approach based on soft tissues is limited to a very narrow temporal window of inference because of rapid elemental turnover. This greatly restricts the use of this technique in inferring origins of small nomadic species.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".