Demographic Parameters and Harvest-Explicit Population Viability Analysis for Polar Bears in M'Clintock Channel, Nunavut, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Polar bear (Ursus maritimus) numbers in M'Clintock Channel, Nunavut, Canada have decreased significantly since 1972. We used mark–recapture and recovery data collected from 348 marked polar bears from 1972 to 2000 to estimate demographic characteristics and harvest risks of the M'Clintock Channel polar bear population. Total (harvested) survival rates (±1 SE) from mark–recapture analysis were: 0.62 (±0.15) for cubs of the year, 0.90 (±0.04) for subadults (ages 1–4 yr), 0.90 (±0.04) for adult (age ≥5 yr) females, and 0.88 (± 0.04) for adult males. Mean litter size was 1.68 ± 0.15 cubs with a mean reproductive interval of 2.8 ± 0.2 years. By 6 years of age, on average 0.29 ± 0.47 females were producing litters; mean litter production rate for females aged >6 years was 0.93 ± 0.33. We estimated total abundance to average 284 ± 59.3 bears, of which 166.9 ± 35.4 individuals were female and 117.2 ± 26.4 were male. We incorporated our standing age and mark–recapture demographic parameters as input into a harvest risk analysis designed to account for demographic, environmental, and sampling uncertainty. Population growth rate was 0.946 ± 0.038 for the period 1993–1999. A harvest quota not exceeding 3 bears/year is required if the population is to increase in the short term. Slightly higher quota options are available if increased risk and recovery times are accepted by stakeholders.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".