Geographic and habitat fidelity in the short-eared owl (Asio flammeus)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past half a century, the Short-eared Owl (Asio flammeus) has experienced a severe population decline across North America. Many aspects of Short-eared Owl natural history are poorly understood, thus hampering the development of effective management plans. The overall goal of this thesis was to help to fill the knowledge gaps that exist, and at the same time provide a foundation for future studies. The specific objectives were three-fold: 1) to investigate Short-eared Owl spatial origins across North America in the context of nomadic, migratory and/or philopatric movements; 2) to develop a practical visual survey protocol aimed at improving monitoring efforts and facilitating assessments of across season landscape-level habitat use; and 3) to describe nest site characteristics, success, and causes of failure. Stable isotope analysis was used to investigate spatial origins of Short-eared Owls, and while exploratory in nature, evidence was provided that the species may exhibit different movement strategies across their North American range. The volunteer visual survey protocol developed here was successful over a trial period, and should become a reliable monitoring scheme to track abundance and distribution through time. Based on the comparison of sites 'used' versus 'available' on two islands on Lake Ontario near Kingston, in eastern Ontario, the Short-eared Owl's use of forest cover during the winter appears to be dependent on seasonal effects. Also, during the breeding season in this geographical area, grazed grassland with scattered trees should be considered important habitat. Short-eared Owls exhibited a tendency for loose nesting aggregations in areas that were predominantly tall grasses, and often on grazed grassland. Fledging success was low and both anthropogenic and natural causes of mortality were identified. The findings of this study will contribute greatly to the current understanding of Short-eared Owl natural history, and the techniques described will be valuable tools for subsequent research and conservation initiatives.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".