Spatial patterns in hydrogen isotope ratios in feathers of Burrowing Owls from western North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Deuterium (2H) has been used to track movements of land birds, under the assumption that δ2H in precipitation (δ2Hp) and δ2H in bird feathers (δ2Hf) are correlated across broad geographic gradients. The nature of this correlation has been evaluated only in a small percentage of the birds that breed in North America. We sampled Western Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia hypugaea) feathers of known origin (nestling feathers) at 36 locations throughout North America (from southern Canada to central Mexico). We used a modification of the “comparative equilibrium” technique of Wassenaar and Hobson (2003) to measure the δ2H of nonexchangeable hydrogen in feather samples. We characterized the strength of the relationship between δ2Hf and amount-weighted mean annual δ2Hp in a raptor that breeds in arid grasslands and deserts throughout western North America. We used a Bayesian hierarchical approach to model the δ2Hf–δ2Hp relationship, accounting for levels of intrinsic and extrinsic variation in δ2Hf. We found a linear relationship between δ2Hf and δ2Hp (δ2Hf = −13.48 + 0.78 δ2Hp; 95% credible interval (slope): 0.55–1.01) and used this relationship to construct a feather deuterium isoscape map. We observed relatively high levels of variation in mean δ2Hf across locations (SD = 11.01‰), due in part to variation in the contribution of precipitation to local food webs, and substantial variation among individuals within locations (SD = 6.68‰). Our data demonstrate that δ2Hf of juvenile Burrowing Owls can be used to infer local amount-weighted mean annual δ2Hp from the location of origin. Deuterium remains a valuable tool for tracking continental-scale raptor movements, with the caveat that researchers must identify and model for potential discontinuities in the δ2Hf–δ2Hp relationship in their inferences. However, isotopic discontinuities, coupled with a high relative abundance of individuals in those areas, can seriously hinder the usefulness of deuterium for identifying the origin of individual birds.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".