Seasonal variation in diet composition and similarity of sympatric red deer Cervus elaphus and roe deer Capreolus capreolus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Use of food resources by herbivores depends on intrinsic constraints, essentially body size and morpho-physiological characteristics, which determine the range of foods they tolerate and environmental constraints, such as seasonality and interspecific interactions, which determine the availability of resources. We analysed a collection of rumen contents samples from sympatric populations of red deer Cervus elaphus and roe deer Capreolus capreolus and tested several theoretical predictions relating to the impact of intrinsic and environmental constraints on diet composition, diversity and similarity. Red deer consumed more slowly digestible, fibrous forage than roe deer and had a more diverse diet throughout the year, which supports predictions deriving from specific body size and morpho-physiological characteristics. In conformity with the optimal foraging theory, both species consumed more slowly digestible forage in times of low food availability (i.e. during winter) than during the rest of the year. An increase in diet similarity in winter, along with predictions from the theory on competitive interaction processes, led us to assume that food resources were not limiting and that exploitative competition between red and roe deer was unlikely in our study area. We underline the importance of studies of the use of food resources by sympatric herbivores in answering applied ecological questions at the local scale, and we suggest that the Euclidean geometrical approach we used is particularly well suited for the analysis of resource matrices, a common end-product of long-term field data gathering on the feeding habits of animals.
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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".