Multi‐scale habitat selection of elk in response to beetle‐killed forest
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Forests of the Rocky Mountains (USA and Canada) have experienced a large‐scale bark‐beetle ( Dendoctronus ponderosae ) epidemic that has led to widespread mortality of pine trees, followed by structural and compositional changes to the forest. The millions of dead trees resulting from this event likely have an effect on ecosystem processes, but currently those effects are mostly unclear. Changes to forest canopy and understory structure are likely to affect behavior and space use of large ungulates as forage abundance, thermal cover, and locomotive costs are presumably altered. We developed and tested hypotheses for how resource selection in summer of female elk ( Cervus canadensis ; n = 47; 2012–2016), the primary large mammal in our study area, was influenced by changes in canopy, understory vegetation, and downed logs in bark‐beetle affected forest in south‐central Wyoming, USA. We employed global positioning system (GPS) technology, an imagery‐derived land cover classification specifically depicting beetle‐affected forest, and on‐the‐ground forest measurements to develop resource and step selection functions. At the study area scale, elk avoided beetle‐killed forest during nearly all parts of the day and selected for intact conifer forest during the day. At the micro‐habitat scale, as canopy cover decreased in beetle‐killed areas, there was a concomitant increase in grass biomass and downed logs. Nevertheless, while in the forest, elk did not alter resource selection relative to changes in understory vegetation or downed logs. The boost in forage abundance within beetle‐killed areas was insufficient to overcome the presumed increases in energy expenditures associated with locomotion and thermoregulation in beetle‐killed forests. The bark‐beetle epidemic has altered how elk use the landscape and has resulted in a potential loss of forest habitat that elk use during the day. Our results indicate that habitat treatments (i.e., fire or harvest) that remove standing dead trees and downed logs in beetle‐killed forest would further facilitate understory growth while reducing the locomotion costs associated with foraging in beetle‐killed forest. © 2019 The Wildlife Society.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".