Foraging strategies of sympatric lagomorphs: implications for differential success in fragmented landscapes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent decades, the distribution of New England cottontails (Sylvilagus transitionalis) has declined substantially in response to forest maturation and fragmentation. Populations of eastern cottontails (Sylvilagus floridanus) have expanded into the range of S. transitionalis, since they are apparently less affected by the consequences of habitat modifications. We suspected that S. floridanus was able to exploit small patches of habitat where S. transitionalis was vulnerable to intense predation and we evaluated this explanation using large enclosures within which we manipulated the quality and distribution of food in relation to escape cover. In trials with low-quality food in cover and high-quality food in open areas, S. transitionalis sacrificed food quality for safety by remaining in close proximity to cover. Sylvilagus floridanus avoided low-quality food in cover and foraged at sites containing high-quality food away from cover. When food was removed from cover, S. transitionalis was reluctant to forage in the open and lost a greater proportion of body mass and succumbed to higher rates of predation than did S. floridanus. We applied these results to patterns of foraging by free-ranging rabbits in a fragmented landscape and estimated that S. transitionalis could successfully exploit only 32% of the available habitat without experiencing elevated rates of predation, whereas S. floridanus could exploit 99% of the habitat. Thus, the consequences of habitat fragmentation (especially higher predation risk) may not be as detrimental to S. floridanus, and this species will likely persist, whereas populations of S. transitionalis will continue to decline.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".