Increased rice flooding during winter explains the recent increase in the Pacific Flyway White‐fronted Goose<i>Anser albifrons frontalis</i>population in North America
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite declines in numerous migratory bird populations due to global climate and landscape changes, the Pacific Flyway population of Greater White‐fronted Geese Anser albifrons frontalis in North America has flourished over recent decades. However, the demographic foundations of the population increase remain unclear, largely due to sparse data. In this study, we used a Bayesian integrated population model (IPM) to maximize information from multiple data sources including coordinated population survey, ring‐recovery and hunter‐harvested goose tail data. We estimated demographic parameters and assessed the role of several possible drivers of the observed population increase, including density‐dependent processes, agricultural land use change and climate conditions in both the wintering and the breeding season, while also accounting for the impacts of harvest. Non‐harvest survival of all geese was 0.83 (95% credible interval (CRI): 0.70–0.96) before legislation restricted post‐harvest rice field burning, and 0.98 (95% CRI: 0.94–1.0) afterwards. We detected a negative effect of density‐dependent processes and a positive effect of El Niño‐Southern Oscillation on non‐harvest survival with high certainty. Kill rates were 0.11 (95% CRI: 0.09–0.12) for adults (after hatch year) and 0.26 (95% CRI 0.21–0.31) for juveniles (hatch year), resulting in annual survival rates of 0.81 (95% CRI: 0.69–0.89) for adults and 0.67 (95% CRI: 0.56–0.76) for juveniles. The ratio of juvenile birds to adults in the population was on average 0.36 (95% CRI: 0.29–0.45) and was driven by negative density‐dependent processes with high certainty. Our results suggest that the ban on rice field burning and subsequent high frequency of flooding as an alternative rice decomposition practice was the primary driver of the Pacific white‐fronted Goose population increase. The effects of climate change and density dependence were not strong enough to suppress the benefit of flooded rice. Given sparse demographic data for Pacific white‐fronted Geese, we were only able to uncover drivers of demography using IPMs. We encourage practitioners with sparse data similarly to consider forming IPMs to determine the drivers and mechanisms for population change and to prioritize future data collection.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 it