Evaluation of intercept feeding to reduce livestock depredation by grizzly bears
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Supplemental and diversionary feeding can reduce conflicts between wildlife and people. However, feeding also can increase species abundance, survival, and reproductive success, which might increase human–wildlife conflicts. In southwestern Alberta, Canada, the provincial government fed road-killed ungulates to grizzly bears (Ursus arctos) each spring during 1998–2013 attempting to reduce spring depredation of livestock by grizzly bears. We used non-invasive genetic sampling, remote trail cameras, and complaint records to evaluate the efficacy of Alberta's intercept-feeding program. We monitored 12 intercept-feeding locations in 2012 and 2013. Using DNA, we identified 22 grizzly bears (19 M, 3 F) at the intercept-feeding sites. Remote trail cameras detected grizzly bears at all intercept-feeding sites, but detected females with dependent offspring at only 4 of the 12 sites. We reviewed complaint data for incidents before, during, and after the intercept-feeding program. We defined an incident as a situation where the grizzly bear caused property damage, obtained anthropogenic food, or killed or attempted to kill livestock or pets. Spring (1 Mar–15 Jun) grizzly bear–livestock incidents did not decrease during the intercept-feeding program (pre: 1982–1995, x̄ = 0.8 spring livestock incidents/yr, SE = 0.3, during: 1999–2013, x̄ = 3.3 spring livestock incidents/yr, SE = 1.3, t = 1.76, 27 df, P = 0.09). We also collected DNA samples from bears involved in incidents, and only 2 bears detected at intercept-feeding sites were detected also at a spring incident site. The intercept-feeding program was suspended in 2014 and 2015, and we did not detect an increase in spring livestock depredation. We estimated annual operating costs to be $43,850 Canadian dollars (CAD); initial capital equipment investment was $19,000 CAD. In total, approximately $720,600 CAD has been spent on the intercept-feeding program between 1998 and 2013. Intercept feeding did not decrease spring livestock depredation; therefore, other mitigation efforts, including electric fencing and deadstock removal, might be a more cost-effective long-term solution.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".