Evaluating cropland in the Canadian prairies as an ecological trap for the endangered Burrowing Owl <i>Athene cunicularia</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anthropogenic development may influence the choices animals make and their resulting reproductive success and survival. If such choices are maladaptive, the impact of anthropogenic change can be catastrophic to small or declining populations. Over the past century, Canada's prairie landscapes have been altered dramatically, with over two‐thirds of its native grasslands now having been converted to cropland. The decline of the endangered Burrowing Owl Athene cunicularia population is assumed to have resulted from this landscape change, yet no causal link has been demonstrated. One hypothesis to explain this population decline is that owls get caught in an ecological trap, whereby they prefer to establish nests at the start of each breeding season in landscapes that later confer lower reproductive success. Agricultural landscapes represent a plausible potential ecological trap because the short and sparse vegetation in annual crops (seeded each spring) is predicted to be attractive nesting/foraging habitat for Burrowing Owls when they arrive from northward migration, yet crops become substantially taller and denser over the growing season so prey are predicted to become less accessible by the time broods have hatched. We tested this ecological trap hypothesis in a 3‐year study, involving 379 Burrowing Owl pairs, across the agricultural landscapes of southern Alberta and Saskatchewan. In support of the hypothesis, Burrowing Owls did prefer to settle in breeding home‐ranges that contained a higher proportion of cropland, and their prey‐delivery rates during brood‐rearing were lower at nests with a higher proportion of cropland growing in the surrounding landscape. However, in contradiction to a key prediction, the number of fledglings produced (range = 0–9) was higher, not lower, for pairs with more actively growing cropland in their landscapes. Therefore, the decline of the Burrowing Owl in Canada does not appear to result from cropland forming an ecological trap during the breeding season. We also found a significant positive relationship between the amount of summer fallow within Burrowing Owl home‐ranges and the quantity of vertebrate prey delivered to the nest and the number of juveniles fledged, highlighting the importance of this declining land use in raptor conservation.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".