Remotely sensed trends in vegetation productivity and phenology during population decline of the Bathurst caribou (<i>Rangifer tarandus groenlandicus</i>) herd
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Bathurst caribou (Rangifer tarandus groenlandicus (Borowski, 1780)) herd declined from ∼349 000 animals in 1996 to ∼8200 in 2018. Climate-driven changes to tundra and boreal vegetation is one hypothesis for the decline. We modelled and mapped annual productivity and phenology across the herd’s range using enhanced vegetation index (EVI) data derived from a Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) time series spanning 2000–2017. Maximum annual EVI, growing season length, and time-integrated EVI increased significantly on 16%, 18%, and 49% of the core annual range, respectively. Trends toward longer growing seasons were driven entirely by earlier spring green-up and, along with time-integrated EVI, were most prevalent in tundra regions. Trends in forested regions were overwhelmingly related to the influence of forest fires, which burned more than half of the range below the forest–tundra ecotone since 1965. These trends suggest that climate-driven changes in production and phenology have occurred in the tundra and forest–tundra portions of the range and could have contributed to the recent herd decline. However, the trends may also be a result of herd decline itself, given the loss of this large herbivore from the landscape. Elucidating cause and effect will require comprehensive analysis of interactions between climatic variables, herd dynamics, and vegetation change, complemented by targeted field investigations.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".