Evaluating functional recovery of habitat for threatened woodland caribou
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Habitat restoration is a core element for the recovery of many declining species. In western Canada, habitat restoration for the recovery of woodland caribou is focused on linear features ( LF s) created by oil and gas exploration. At present, the only established criterion for LF restoration is when vegetation structure on LF s is similar to surrounding vegetation. Human‐mediated habitat alteration impacts caribou population dynamics by increasing caribou predation rates in two ways: increasing alternate prey populations leading to higher predator numbers and increasing predator hunting efficiency. Linear features increase the movement rates—and may thus increase hunting efficiency—of wolves, a primary predator of caribou and a main hypothesized mechanism for population declines. One approach to determine LF recovery is to identify potential thresholds in the characteristics of regenerating LF s where efficiencies in wolf movement rates are no longer evident. We examined how vegetation affects wolf selection of, and movement on, LF s in northeastern Alberta using five‐minute Global Positioning System locations from 20 wolves. Wolves selected LF s with shorter vegetation and traveled faster on LF s with shorter, sparser vegetation and increased vegetation variability. Travel speeds were reduced by 1.5–1.7 km/h when vegetation exceeded heights of 0.50 m, but at least 30% of a LF required vegetation exceeding 4.1 m to slow movement rates to those traveled while in forest. Policy implications: Most of the movement efficiency afforded to wolves by LF s is mediated when vegetation exceeds 0.50 m, and therefore, active restoration could be focused in areas that have not met this value. Rather than treating this value as a clear threshold equating to functional recovery, multiple metrics across trophic levels must also be evaluated to assess population recovery for caribou.
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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) | 0.003 | 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 it