Behavioural, physiological, and movement relationships between barren-ground caribou and industrial infrastructure in the Northwest Territories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I investigated the behavioural, physiological, and movement responses of barren-ground caribou to the Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road in the central Northwest Territories. Previous research on the zone of influence around industrial infrastructure indicates that caribou avoid these industrial disturbances. This response implies changes in the behaviour, physiology, and movement of caribou as well. I used a multi-method approach to investigate these hypothesized changes for caribou adjacent to the road, employing behavioural observations, assessment of levels of fecal glucocorticoids, and GPS collar data. My results suggest that caribou change their behaviour and movement near the winter road. They engaged in more walking and less foraging near the road, though no relationship was found between the level of fecal glucocorticoids and proximity to the winter road. Using a novel estimation of traffic activity, I demonstrated that caribou crossing of the winter road was negatively correlated with the level of traffic. This barrier effect was not just related to the road’s right-of-way as caribou crossed roads when they were closed to traffic and the probability of selecting a crossing site was extremely low when normal levels of traffic occurred. My results provide new insights on the spatial, behavioural, and physiological responses of caribou when adjacent to industrial features. These findings can guide monitoring and mitigation of existing infrastructure and assist with the evaluation of impacts of proposed mines and roads.
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 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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 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 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".