MARINE AND AGRICULTURAL HABITAT PREFERENCES OF DUNLIN WINTERING IN BRITISH COLUMBIA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examined winter habitat preferences of individual dunlin (Calidris alpina) in the Fraser River delta, British Columbia, Canada, adjacent to agricultural land near an area of dense and increasing human settlement. We used radiotelemetry and compositional analysis to quantify and describe dunlin habitat selection at 2 scales (regional and local) throughout the 24-hr day and daily tidal cycles. We tested for differences between sex and age classes, and among birds captured at different sites. Patterns of habitat preference differed between sexes and among dunlin from different sites in the delta, but we detected no difference between age classes. We ranked habitat types in order of dunlin preference and tested for significant differences among habitat ranks. Dunlin showed a significant preference for tidally influenced marine habitats at both scales and throughout the study area. However, most individuals (>80%) also used terrestrial habitats, usually during high tide and primarily at night. The role of terrestrial habitats in the ecology of Fraser River delta dunlin previously had been underestimated because these habitats are used far more at night than during the day. Regionally, soil-based agricultural crops ranked above other terrestrial habitats, and pasture was the only terrestrial habitat that was ranked highly and preferred at both scales. Pasture vegetation tends to be short, and pasture fields in the Fraser River delta are fertilized heavily and naturally with cattle manure. We recommend that managers promote the maintenance of a mosaic of soil-based agricultural crops—with a particular emphasis on naturally fertilized pastures—for dunlin and other shorebirds wintering in the Fraser delta. Terrestrial habitat fragmentation also should be kept to a minimum, as dunlin preferred large fields, likely in response to predation risk.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".