Recent Decline of the George River Caribou Herd as Revealed by Tree-Ring Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dendroecological analysis is often used in animal ecology to infer population fluctuations. In this study, we used scars produced by caribou hooves on superficial roots of conifers to evaluate the recent activity of the George River caribou herd (GRCH). In 1999 and 2000, we sampled a minimum of 300 trampling scars at each of 31 lichen woodland sites distributed over the summer habitat of the GRCH. Among the 31 selected sites, 18 had been previously sampled in 1992–1993 and showed a good agreement in trends inferred in caribou activity with the 1999–2000 data set at the same sites. We evaluated the recent activity pattern of the GRCH using mean values of pooled scar-age data from the 31 sites. We inferred two major trends from the tree-ring data: that the GRCH experienced an important increase from 1975 to the late 1980s, and that this growth was followed by a major decline that began in the early 1990s. Radio-collar data from 1991 to 1998 also support the decline as no major change was found in the geographical distribution of the GRCH during this period.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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) | 0.002 | 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".