Reproductive success of mule deer in a natural gas development area
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Natural gas development is increasing across North America and causing concern over the potential impacts on wildlife populations and their habitat, particularly for ungulate species. Understanding how this development impacts reproductive success metrics that are influential for ungulate population dynamics is important to guide management of ungulates. However, the influences of natural gas development on reproductive success metrics of mule deer Odocoileus hemionus have not been studied. We used statistical models to examine the influence of natural gas development and temporal factors on reproductive success metrics of mule deer in the Piceance Basin, northwest Colorado during 2012–2014. We focused on study areas with relatively high or low levels of natural gas development. Pregnancy and in utero fetal rates were high and statistically indistinguishable between study areas. Fetal survival rates increased over time and survival was lower in the high versus low development study areas in 2012 possibly influenced by drought coupled with habitat loss and fragmentation associated with development. Our novel results suggest managers should be concerned with the influences of development on fetal survival, particularly during extreme environmental conditions (e.g. drought) and our results can be used to guide development planning and/or mitigation. Developers and wildlife managers should continue to collaborate on development planning, such as implementing habitat treatments to improve forage availability and quality, minimizing disturbance to hiding and foraging habitat particularly during parturition, and implementing directional drilling to minimize pad disturbance density to increase fetal survival in developed areas.
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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".