Tree Swallow (<i>Tachycineta bicolor</i>) foraging responses to agricultural land use and abundance of insect prey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Throughout North America, many species of aerial insectivorous birds have exhibited steep declines. The timing of these declines coincides with changes in agriculture, perhaps signaling a causal link. Increased agrochemical use, wetland drainage, and cropping intensity may indirectly influence insectivores by reducing the abundance of insect prey. Our objective was to determine whether changes in insect abundance and biomass on agricultural landscapes in the Canadian Prairies influence the foraging behaviour of breeding Tree Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor (Vieillot, 1808)). Swallows were studied at five sites with varying levels of agricultural intensity in Saskatchewan, where insect abundance and biomass were monitored daily with passive aerial samplers. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology was employed at Tree Swallow nest boxes to investigate adult foraging behaviour. Foraging rates (number of nest visits/h) were slightly higher on agricultural sites than at grassland sites, and were positively related to daily insect biomass and nestling age. Tree Swallows, especially males, breeding at agricultural sites spent more time away from the nest box, presumably foraging, resulting in reduced nest attentiveness. RFID technology provides an effective technique to measure behaviour in birds and these findings suggest mechanisms by which prey abundance and agricultural land use may affect declining aerial insectivorous bird populations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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".