Revising the range of Rocky Mountain tailed frog, <i>Ascaphus montanus</i>, in British Columbia, Canada, using environmental DNA methods
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Rocky Mountain tailed frog, Ascaphus montanus , is a species at‐risk in Canada. Based upon time‐ and area‐constrained physical search surveys completed between 1996 and 2004, its Canadian distribution was defined as occurring in 19 tributaries and reaches within the Yahk and west side Flathead River Basins of British Columbia. We undertook a five‐year (2014–2018 inclusive) environmental DNA (eDNA) survey to reassess the distribution of Rocky Mountain tailed frog, focusing on tributaries proximal to known extant occurrence records. Seventeen days of field sampling were performed over the five‐year period. Targeted qPCR‐based eDNA approaches proved more effective than conventional physical search methods for detecting tailed frogs due to relatively rapid field collection, low cost of filter materials, elimination of observer bias, and higher detection probabilities compared to conventional time‐constrained survey methods. One hundred and forty sites were examined (138 for eDNA plus two visual only). Thirty‐two of the 138 sites (23%) tested positive for Rocky Mountain tailed frog DNA, including from the four extant populations sampled, whereas visual observations occurred at only seven of the sites (5%) during the survey. During the study, we evaluated two tailed frog tests and the mitigation of false negatives through testing for qPCR inhibition and sample degradation, and we demonstrate their utility in evaluating eDNA data quality. These results expand the extant range of Rocky Mountain tailed frog in the Flathead, Wigwam, and Yahk watersheds and add two new watersheds (Moyie and Tepee) by identifying five newly recorded occupied drainages in Canada: Elder Creek, Upper Wigwam River, Tepee Creek, Gilnockie Creek, and Elmer Creek. These data are important to refine and augment wildlife habitat conservation areas for Rocky Mountain tailed frog.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".