Female White‐tailed deer ( <i>Odocoileus virginianus</i> ) Behavior During Pregnancy, Parturition, and Lactation in 2 Contrasting Ecoregions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Late gestation, parturition, and lactation are the most metabolically expensive periods for female ungulates, often requiring them to make trade‐offs between acquiring sufficient forage and reducing predation risk to neonates. Females alter movements and resource use depending on the stage of parturition; however, little is known about the influence of habitat type and fragmentation on parturition behavior. We evaluated how land use and habitat fragmentation affected white‐tailed deer ( Odocoileus virginianus ) space use, movements, and resource selection before, during, and after parturition in the highly fragmented glaciated plains (GP) and the more‐contiguous forested Ozark (OZ) ecoregions of Missouri, USA. We captured 127 pregnant female deer from January–March 2015–2017 and fitted them with global positioning system radio‐collars. We examined weekly home range sizes, space use shifts, movement speeds, and resource selection. Females in both study areas maintained stable movement speeds until the week of parturition when crepuscular movement speeds decreased significantly. Home range sizes were ≥150% smaller during the week of parturition compared to the third week before parturition in both study areas. Females shifted their space use 144 m (95% confidence interval [CI] = 830–252 m) in the GP and 162 m (95% CI 103–256 m) in the OZ between the week before parturition and the week of parturition. Females in both study areas exhibited similar patterns of resource selection before, during, and after parturition. Females consistently selected for Conservation Reserve Program grasslands in the GP and deciduous forests in the OZ, which could provide suitable forage for the female and adequate cover for the neonate. The similarity in movements and resource selection surrounding parturition in both areas, despite marked differences in land use and levels of fragmentation, suggests that the physiological cues of pregnancy and lactation may have the greatest influence on maternal behavior. © 2021 The Wildlife Society.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.002 | 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".