Breeding success and productivity of urban and rural Eurasian sparrowhawks <i>Accipiter nisus</i> in Scotland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The conversion of rural habitat into built-up areas often affects animal species negatively. However, some generalist bird species and raptors relying on avian prey have colonised urban environments. Surprisingly, no study has compared the breeding biology of urban and rural populations of a very common old-world raptor, the Eurasian sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus). Here, we compare the territory occupancy rate, breeding success and productivity (i.e., the number of fledglings) over four years (2009–2012) of an urban and a rural sparrowhawk population in Scotland. Our results showed that urban sparrowhawk territories were occupied significantly more frequently (mean % years occupied ± se: 66.8 ± 5.9%) than rural territories (42.8 ± 4.7%). Clutch size, brood size and the number of fledglings produced did not differ between the populations. However, the breeding success was significantly higher in the urban (annual mean ± se: 97.2 ± 2.3% nests successful) than in the rural population (80.5 ± 6.6%) because of a higher nest desertion rate at the egg and chick stages in the rural population. Our study suggests that warm weather in July may have more negative effects on rural sparrowhawks compared to urban sparrowhawks. The mechanism behind the difference is unknown and requires further work.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".