Experimental Assessment of the Impact of Agricultural Machinery on Wood Turtles (Glyptemys insculpta)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The wood turtle (Glyptemys insculpta) is a threatened species that uses agricultural fields, in part, to nest, bask, and feed. This use of anthropogenic habitats has resulted in the injury and death of individuals during crop harvest. Turtles have been exposed to hay harvests for over a century but the increased use of rotary disc mowers may have increased mortality rates to unsustainable levels. Mitigation measures have focused on raising blade height to minimize contact with turtles but these measures are based on the dimensions of the largest turtles and the effects of agricultural machinery on subadults, juveniles, and hatchlings have not been quantified. We sought to quantify how different agricultural machinery affects wood turtles at multiple life stages through experimental trials using 2 mower types. Cantaloupe (Cucumis melo) halves were used as turtle proxies to avoid actual harm to turtles. We found that rotary disc mowers resulted in a significantly greater injury to adult (i.e., female, male, and subadult) and young (i.e., juvenile and hatchling age class) proxies at low grass heights (10–20 cm) compared with sickle cutter bar mowers. Young proxies were found to be essentially unaffected by the sickle mower at all grass heights, but they were highly affected by the rotary disc mower at grass heights from 10 to 18 cm. If blade heights were to be raised to reduce the risk to wood turtles, a minimum blade height of 17 cm would be needed to obtain > 50% of adults remaining undamaged during harvest and a minimum height of 15 cm would be needed for young turtles.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".