Spatial ecology of cougars (Puma concolor) in the Cypress Hills: Implications for human-cougar interactions and range expansion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cougar (Puma concolor) range is expanding eastward in North America. Understanding how range expansion is occurring in a human-dominated landscape is needed to manage the social and ecological implications of a returning large carnivore. To address this, I used GPS-radio collars and remote cameras to study the habitat and movement ecology of an isolated and recently reestablished population of cougars in the Cypress Hills in southwest Saskatchewan and southeast Alberta, Canada. I found that cougars avoided high human-use areas during seasonal peaks in human activity but used these areas according to their availability when human activity was lower. During transience, sub-adult cougars adopted fast-paced nocturnal movements to traverse large stretches of unsuitable (matrix) habitat. The cougar’s adaptability to changes in human activity, together with their dispersal capability, will facilitate greater eastward range expansion. This could potentially restore important components of ecosystem structure and function to areas currently devoid of large carnivores.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".