Social and spatial organization of Vancouver Island cougar (Puma concolor vancouverensis, Nelson and Goldman, 1943)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Vancouver Island is noted for having the highest concentration of cougar-human interaction in North America, yet prior to this study, little scientific data were available on the only subspecies of cougar to occur on Vancouver Island. I studied a cougar (Puma concolor vancouverensis) population in coastal temperate rainforests on southeastern Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Initiated in 1991 and conducted during 1993 - 1996, my study examined home range characteristics, dispersal, recruitment, population structure and density. Mean size (61 km) of annual home ranges of female cougar was as small or smaller than reported in other studies. Male home ranges were exclusive and overlapped several resident females, a social structure that is typical of most studied populations. Dispersal of young was male-biased in my study with all young males dispersing from the study area and included the first scientifically documented occurrence of a cougar swimming from Vancouver Island to adjacent Gulf Islands. In contrast, all known female offspring remained within the study area and provided the only identified source of recruitment into the resident female population. Subadult females displayed 100% philopatry establishing home ranges that overlapped or were immediately adjacent to their natal home range. Recruitment of female offspring continued irrespective of increasing density in the final 2 years of the study. Cougar densities (5.0 /100 km²), documented in the final year of the study, were among the highest recorded densities in North America. Observed densities were characterized by small home ranges with considerable home range overlap among resident female cougar. Indices of deer abundance were insufficient to explain the high density of cougar or small size of home ranges. Only 2 types of mortality were identified in this population. Animal control kills contributed most (58%) to cougar mortalities and was likely attributable to the close proximity of the study to human populated areas. Intraspecific killing accounted for 80% of remaining mortality or 33% of total mortalities. The high density and level of intraspecific strife observed in this cougar population are characteristic of a population regulated by social interactions and may suggest that social interactions were a regulatory factor in my study population.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".