Standardized Monitoring Strategies for Burrowing Owls on DoD Installations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract : Burrowing Owls (Athene cunicularia) were once a common breeder in grasslands and deserts throughout the western U.S. and Canada. However, some populations have declined and Burrowing Owls have been extirpated from areas on the western, northern, and eastern periphery of their breeding range. Habitat loss and fragmentation due to agricultural or urban development, the reduction of prairie in the United States, and the control of burrowing mammals such as prairie dogs (Cynomys spp.) and ground squirrels (Spermophilus spp.) are thought to be the causes for the decline in Burrowing Owls (Desmond and others 2000; Klute and others 2003; Sheffield 1997). Due to concerns about persistence of remaining Burrowing Owl populations, Burrowing Owls are now federally endangered in Canada, and are listed as a Species of National Conservation Concern in the U.S. (US Fish and Wildlife Service 2002). Despite the declines in some portions of their range, Burrowing Owls appear to be increasing in other areas. One possible explanation for this paradox is that Burrowing Owls are becoming less migratory; owls which once migrated to northern breeding locations during the summer are becoming year-round residents in the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico. In other words, breeding owl populations might be redistributing rather than declining. If this hypothesis is correct, it has implications for the validity of current or future Burrowing Owl listing petitions and implications for the effectiveness of different conservation and management efforts. Burrowing Owls have been reported on many DoD installations in the southwestern U.S., and therefore the DoD may play a key role in the maintenance or recovery of Burrowing Owl populations if declines continue. However, we currently lack information on the extent to which Burrowing Owl populations on DoD installations are self-contained and how much dispersal occurs among locations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".