Habitat selection and spatial relationships of black bears (<i>Ursus americanus</i>) with woodland caribou (<i>Rangifer tarandus caribou</i>) in northeastern Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Populations of woodland caribou ( Rangifer tarandus caribou (Gmelin, 1788)) have declined across much of their range. Wolves ( Canis lupus L., 1758) are believed to be responsible for the majority of mortality in adult female caribou; however, we hypothesize that other predators such as black bears ( Ursus americanus Pallas, 1780) may be important contributors to calf mortality. We assessed habitat selection by black bears and spatial relationships of caribou – black bears during the caribou calving season in northeastern Alberta, Canada. Black bears avoided bogs and fens, while selecting upland mixed woods and various industrial features. Conversely, caribou showed strong selection for bogs and fens relative to bears, supporting the hypothesis that caribou in the boreal forest attempt to minimize predation risk by selecting peatlands to avoid areas frequented by predators. However, habitat selection by individual black bears was highly variable and some bears selected habitats similar to those selected by caribou, i.e., bogs and fens. Bears that specialize on foraging in peatlands might be responsible for some of the predation on caribou calves. Because declines in caribou populations have resulted from a combination of high adult female and calf mortalities, management actions to conserve woodland caribou should consider the entire suite of potential predators rather than focusing only on wolves.
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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".