Nest survival data confirm managed housing is an important component to the conservation of the eastern purple martin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT The purple martin ( Progne subis ) is entrenched in a consistent, long‐term decline. This is especially true for the subspecies east of the Rocky Mountains ( P. s. subis ), which today nests almost exclusively in provisioned housing (birdhouses and hollow gourds) provided by citizen scientists. One benefit of provisioned housing is reduced nest‐site competition with nonnative European starlings ( Sturnus vulgaris ) and house sparrows ( Passer domesticus ) when managed by citizen scientists. Increased competition for nest sites and subsequently lower productivity due to declining management of available housing is speculated to be primary factors for their long‐term declines. To assess whether managed housing promoted high nest‐survival metrics, we used a 19‐year database (1995–2013) of nest‐check records provided by Project MartinWatch, a citizen science program of the Purple Martin Conservation Association. We compared nest ecology metrics and survival among housing and entrance‐hole type to assess if specific provisioned housing or entrance‐hole type increased clutch size or number of chicks fledged. Using 72,627 nests across 8 regions monitored by citizen scientists, our major findings were 1) nest survival was >85% among 8 regions in the eastern United States and Canada; and 2) clutch size and number of fledglings produced were slightly larger in natural and artificial gourds with entrances designed to exclude European starlings; but 3) housing and entrance‐hole types were not important predictors of nest survival and clutch size had a small, inverse relationship with daily nest survival (β Clutch = −0.002). Our results suggest managed housing is an important conservation tool based on previously undocumented high nest survival across the numerous artificial housing options. Our findings encourage the use of artificial and natural gourds with European starling‐resistant entrance holes, but promotion of managed artificial housing of any type in North America is beneficial and strongly encouraged. © 2019 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".