A burning question: The spatial response of woodland caribou to wildfire in northeastern Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Canadian Federal Recovery Strategy for woodland caribou classifies areas burned by wildfire in the last 40 years as disturbed habitat for woodland caribou. This delineation of fire disturbance has major economic and social implications across Canada. Caribou have been shown to avoid burned areas, but our understanding of the implications of burned habitats on survival is unclear. Previously, studies used coarse mapping techniques that failed to delineate unburned residual patches within the burn complex, which have recently been proposed to provide undisturbed habitat for caribou. To assess the importance of burns and unburned residual patches, we examined the multi-scale resource selection of these two landcovers and the implications of using burns to adult survival of caribou for 201 individuals dispersed among six Alberta caribou populations. We found that caribou avoided both the burn complex and unburned residual patches in all seasons. However, increased use of burned habitats did not influence survival, while use of uplands significantly decreased survival. Collectively, these results suggest that burns and the corresponding residual patches are indeed low-quality habitat for caribou; however, a negligible survival effect suggests the classification of burned habitat as disturbed may be overstated by current recovery strategy recommendations. This study provides important information for herd-level management decisions and defining critical habitat under the federal mandates.
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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".