Move to nocturnality not a universal trend in carnivore species on disturbed landscapes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anthropogenic landscape change is a leading driver of biodiversity loss. Preceding dramatic changes such as wildlife population declines and range shifts, more subtle responses may signal impending larger‐scale change. For example, disturbance‐induced shifts to species’ activity patterns may disrupt temporal niche partitioning along the 24‐h time axis, compromising community structure via altered competitive interactions. We investigated the impacts of human landscape disturbance on species’ activity patterns and temporal niche partitioning in the Canadian Rocky Mountain carnivore guild using camera trap images collected across two regions encompassing a wide gradient of human footprint. Applying kernel density estimation techniques, we tested for carnivore species’ activity shifts 1) between a low versus high disturbance landscape, and 2) in relation to site‐scale disturbance. To test our hypothesis that human disturbance impacts species’ temporal niche partitioning, we modelled activity overlap between co‐occurring carnivore species in relation to natural and anthropogenic landscape features, as well as carnivore community composition. Multiple carnivore species altered activity patterns between the low versus high disturbance landscapes and camera sites, but these shifts varied considerably among species. While wolves appeared to increase nocturnal activity in relation to disturbance, coyote activity consistently trended towards cathemerality and marten increased diurnal activity. Detecting effects of landscape disturbance on activity overlap between co‐occurring species was highly sensitive to site‐level detection sample sizes, and our results suggest altered temporal niche partitioning between marten and wolverine in relation to forest cover. This study indicates that mesocarnivores may respond differently and perhaps indirectly to anthropogenic disturbance compared to apex predators. Apex predator shifts to nocturnality may facilitate a ‘behavioural release’ in mesocarnivores. This may be a likely component of mesocarnivore population release, with important management implications for ecological communities on disturbed landscapes.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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 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".