Biting flies and activity of caribou in the boreal forest
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Habitat loss has been implicated in the decline of forest‐dwelling caribou ( Rangifer tarandus caribou ), but it is unknown how biting insects, potentially important components of boreal forest habitat for caribou, influence the activity of this threatened species. During summers in 2011 and 2012 in northern Ontario, Canada, we quantified the relative abundance of black flies, mosquitoes, and tabanids in boreal forest stands of different ages and related their abundance to caribou activity. We counted insects in young (25–35 yrs since forest harvesting), intermediate (36–69 yrs), and old (≥70 yrs) stands using sweep nets and counts on human subjects. We related the daily variation in abundance of these insect families, along with daily maximum temperature, to the activity of female caribou, determined by accelerometers in global positioning system collars. We found higher insect abundance in young versus old stands. During the first 5 minutes in a forest stand, the rate of accumulation of mosquitoes and black flies on human subjects increased, but at a decelerating rate, whereas tabanid abundance declined over time. On days when tabanids were more numerous, female caribou were less active, possibly a response to reduce exposure and harassment. To a lesser extent, mosquitoes and black flies also tended to elicit lower activity of caribou. Our study reveals that biting flies can alter the behavior of female caribou in the boreal forest. Loss of old stands may accentuate the potential for insect harassment. © 2018 The Wildlife Society.
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 | 0.001 | 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".