Nest Predators of Ducks in the Boreal Forest
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Nest predation is often the primary cause of nest failure for ducks throughout North America. Tremendous efforts have been made to identify predators responsible for nest predation to benefit the conservation and management of ducks. However, we are unaware of empirical evidence that identifies predators of duck nests in the boreal forest, which is an important breeding area. We used camera traps on real ( n = 53) and artificial nests ( n = 164) from 2016 to 2018 to identify predators of boreal duck nests near Utikuma Lake, Alberta, Canada. We identified 8 species of duck nest predators that ate or removed eggs from nests: American black bear ( Ursus americanus ), short‐tailed or least weasel ( Mustela spp.), Canada lynx ( Lynx canadensis ), coyote ( Canis latrans ), American marten ( Martes americana ), red squirrel ( Tamiasciurus hudsonicus ), common raven ( Corvus corax ), and red‐tailed hawk ( Buteo jamaicensis ). Despite a long history of duck‐nest predator research, our study confirmed previously undocumented nest predators of ducks from the boreal forest. The suite of nest predators was different from common prairie nest predators and we did not observe common prairie nest predators at our study area. Climate change and industrial development are altering predator–prey interactions, causing changes to wildlife communities in this region and our data provide an initial step in improving our understanding of boreal ducks. © 2020 The Wildlife Society.
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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".