Browsing of Antelope Bitterbrush(Purshia tridentata: Rosaceae) in the South Okanagan Valley, British Columbia: Age Preferences and Seasonal Differences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We compared browsing on twigs of small and large antelope bitterbrush (Purshia tridentata) shrubs among ten sites in the south Okanagan valley, British Columbia. We tested whether there were any age preferences by browsers and determined whether these preferences changed between seasons and mode of browsing. Two different types of browsing were observed: leaf stripping which occurred in the summer and twig clipping which occurred predominantly in the winter. We calculated age and size relationships showing that shoot volume and especially stem diameter were good predictors of shrub age. Among the ten sites, clipping removed 0.02 to 15.7% of a shrub's total twig length and stripping removed leaves from 0 to 5.2% of total twig length. Observations suggested that California bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis california) stripped antelope bitterbrush leaves in late summer, mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus hemionus) clipped twigs in the winter and cattle clipped twigs in the summer. Browsers preferred to clip twigs on smaller and hence younger antelope bitterbrush shrubs. In contrast, larger and older shrubs were preferred for leaf stripping. Since twig clipping was more prevalent than leaf stripping in antelope bitterbrush, overall preference for younger shrubs may lead to difficulties in seedling establishment in regions where it is heavily used as winter forage.
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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 | 0.002 |
| 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".