Seabirds in a changing ocean: an overview of 20 years of research and monitoring on Machias Seal Island, Bay of Fundy, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper reviews some of the more obvious changes in the populations and diets of seabirds breeding on Machias Seal Island, at the junction of the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of Maine, from 1995 through 2015.This is the largest seabird colony in this oceanic ecosystem, hosting colonies of cold-water species at the southern edge of their distribution.My lab's research over 20 years has been focused in two directions -exploring how several closely-related species persist in co-existence here, and interpreting changes in the birds' biology in terms of responses to environmental changes.Diet played a major role in ecological isolation, but has changed considerably in response to virtual disappearance of juvenile herring since the late 1990s and the recent appearance of juvenile haddock.Ocean warming since 2000 has accelerated, especially after a sudden decrease in water temperature and salinity around 2005, which had as much deleterious effect as the subsequent warming.A major finding has been that the three most abundant breeders -Atlantic Puffin, Razorbill, and Arctic Ternexchange individuals with other colonies in the Gulf of Maine and so each constitutes a true meta-population.This study, with similar collaborative work on those colonies, provides a unique spatial perspective on marine seabird population dynamics in a rapidly-changing ecosystem.Two species (Razorbills and Common Murres) show wholly unexpected increases in numbers, despite declines in several demographic measures that bode ill for the long-term sustainability of this colony.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".