Life in a northern town: rural villages in the boreal forest are islands of habitat for an endangered bat
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Urban development is detrimental to many wildlife species; however, endangered little brown bats ( Myotis lucifugus ) may be attracted to human settlements, making them a synurbic species. Buildings likely provide high‐quality roosting habitat, which may be a limiting factor in the boreal forest where trees are typically small and potentially unsuitable for hosting large maternity colonies. In the boreal forest, there are relatively few urban developments in a matrix of wilderness and apparently suboptimal natural roosting habitat; thus, we hypothesized that isolated rural villages were islands of summer habitat for little brown bats that may be important for their conservation and recovery. To test this hypothesis, we investigated the relationship between little brown bat activity, foraging rates, and proximity to rural villages. We expected bat activity and foraging rates to increase with proximity to villages, as bats should optimally forage near their roosts to minimize flight costs. We used ultrasonic detectors to passively monitor bat activity near three rural villages in Yukon, Canada, and characterized bat habitat with forest measurements and remotely sensed data. Bat activity increased with proximity to village centers, but foraging activity did not, suggesting that human settlements in the boreal forest were important as roosting rather than foraging habitat. Bat activity was higher near water bodies and areas with relatively high densities of linear features (e.g., roads and transmission lines), perhaps because prey were most abundant near water features and along forest edges. The island phenomenon we observed (i.e., higher bat activity near villages) has also been documented in larger human settlements at lower latitudes, where urban areas provided better roosting habitat than surrounding agricultural matrices. Given that little brown bats were concentrated near rural villages, small human settlements should be a focus of conservation efforts in the boreal forest—particularly the identification and protection of buildings used as maternity colonies. Our study advances knowledge of little brown bat habitat requirements in the boreal forest and identifies habitats that may be important for their recovery.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 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 it