Forage diversity, type and abundance influence winter resource selection by white‐tailed deer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Questions The presence of a plant species can influence the selection of another plant species by herbivores. Natural communities encompass several plant species, and in these multi‐species environments, resource selection by herbivores could be partly explained by plant diversity. Our objective was to determine how winter consumption by a large herbivore (white‐tailed deer) varies relative to the diversity and composition of the plant community in a temperate forest. (a) Does browsing increases or decreases with diversity indices; and (b) are specific community compositions linked to high or low browsing by deer? We also aimed to determine whether neighbouring plant diversity and identity could modify browsing on a specific species, Pinus strobus (hereafter pine). Location Vallée de la Gatineau, Québec, Canada. Methods We sampled 102 plots in the sugar maple ( Acer saccharum )–basswood ( Tilia americana ) subdomain, a deciduous type of forest in the northern temperate zone. Each plot was centred on a pine and browsing by deer, plot diversity and composition were measured. Results Total browsing and browsing on focal pines decreased with increasing values of diversity indices, but only in plots with high resource abundance. This result is in accordance with optimal foraging principles, as diversified plots have a lower concentration of preferred species. Total consumption did not vary with plot composition, but browsing on the focal pine decreased with increased abundance of Diervilla lonicera and Lonicera canadensis , abundant deciduous shrubs. This associational defence could protect vulnerable pines from deer browsing. Conclusion While our study revealed a relationship between plant community diversity and winter browse use and selection by deer, it also highlighted the importance of resource abundance and community composition – variables influencing the resource selection process. Diversity measures can describe vegetation communities, but probably do not represent the way in which herbivores perceive their environment.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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".