Effects of Habitat Management for Ducks on Target and Nontarget Species
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Habitat management for ducks has significant implications for the conservation of other species. We hypothesized that, because of their flagship and umbrella characteristics, upland-nesting ducks might be effective surrogate species for songbird and shorebird conservation in the dry mixed-grass prairie. We tested this by comparing effects of habitat management (cattle grazing deferments and field size), distance to other habitat (water, cropland/forage, roads), and vegetation, on the richness and density of ducks, songbirds, and shorebirds in southern Alberta, Canada. There were no consistently similar responses to these habitat characteristics among ducks, songbirds and shorebirds. Despite their conceptual appeal, ducks are, therefore, unlikely to be good surrogate species for avian conservation in the dry mixed-grass prairie. Habitat managers and conservation planners should empirically validate whether habitat management for ducks positively affects other species, if this is a management objective. Our results suggest that in dry mixed-grass prairie, deferring cattle grazing is likely to increase densities of only lesser scaup but that grazing, in general, can be used by managers to create a heterogeneous habitat that supports many species.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".