Trappings of Success: Predator Removal for Duck Nest Survival in Alberta Parklands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nest survival is most limited by nest predation, which often is increased by anthropogenic causes including habitat fragmentation, mesopredator release and predator subsidies. In mallards and other upland-nesting duck species in the North American prairies, the rate of nest survival is the vital rate most influential to population dynamics, with 15%–20% survival required for maintenance of stable populations. Predator removal during the nesting season has increased duck nest survival on township-sized (9324 ha) areas of agricultural ecosystems in eastern locations of the prairie pothole region (PPR). However, predator removal has not been evaluated in western parkland habitats of the PPR where three-dimensional structure of vegetation is considerably greater. During 2015–2017, we evaluated nest survival on control and predator-removal plots at two study areas in the parklands of central Alberta, Canada. In the second year of the study, we transposed predator removal to control for habitat effects. Estimates of 34-day nest survival did not significantly differ between trapped ( x ¯ = 20.9%, 95% CI = 13.2%–33.7%) and control ( x ¯ = 17.8%, 95% CI = 10.5%–30.0%) plots in any year. We do not recommend predator removal be continued in Alberta parklands due to its ineffectiveness at improving duck nest survival at the local scale.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".