Association between Wildlife and Agriculture: Underlying Mechanisms and Implications in Burrowing Owls
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Western burrowing owls (Athene cunicularia hypugaea) are endangered in Canada and several western U.S. states. Population declines have been linked with control measures aimed at burrowing mammals and loss of nesting habitat. The owls frequently associate with irrigated agriculture throughout portions of their western U.S. range. To determine potential factors driving the association of burrowing owls with agriculture, we examined availability of suitable nest burrows (burrow availability hypothesis), abundance of potential prey (prey availability hypothesis), and predation of nest burrows (predation hypothesis) for owls nesting in the Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area in southwestern Idaho during 2001–2002. Nest burrow availability did not differ between agricultural and nonagricultural habitats, and occupancy rates of owls in artificial burrows were greater near agriculture. More rodent prey species were live-trapped in agricultural habitat compared with nonagricultural habitat, and there was no difference in relative abundance of prey between habitat types. Pellet remains indicated greater abundance and biomass of prey being consumed in agricultural habitat compared with nonagricultural habitat. Finally, predation rates of dummy nests in agricultural and nonagricultural habitat did not differ. These findings allow us to reject the burrow availability and predation hypotheses, while the prey availability hypothesis remains tenable. Thus, burrowing owls may nest near irrigated agriculture in southwestern Idaho because of increased diversity or availability of prey. We suggest that research is needed to determine how widespread this prey availability relationship may be and how management of burrowing owls in agricultural landscapes may take advantage of this apparent rich prey resource.
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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".