Decline of Duck Nest Success Revisited: Relationships With Predators and Wetlands in Dynamic Prairie Environments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Covariation among factors that may affect nest success of dabbling ducks in the Prairie Pothole Region of North America (e.g. productivity of upland and wetland habitat related to climate variation, and duck and predator densities) often confounds efforts to interpret the effect of any individual factor. A comparison of nest success of dabbling ducks at sites with and without predator management provided an opportunity to separate the effect of predation pressure from other factors because predator management has occurred over a range of climatic conditions. We updated an existing study on temporal trends of nest success for prairie ducks in the Prairie Pothole Region of North America by compiling recent estimates of nest success for five species of dabbling ducks (Mallard [Anas platyhrynchos], Northern Pintail [A. acuta], Northern Shoveler [A. clypeata], Blue-winged Teal [A. discors], and Gadwall [A. strepera]). In addition, we compared trends of nest success at unmanaged sites and sites where nest predators were excluded or removed. We used pond density calculated from annual surveys for breeding waterfowl as an index of upland and wetland productivity and a correlate of predator and duck density. At unmanaged sites, the best approximating local regression model suggested that, rather than having undergone a monotonic decline, average nest success has fluctuated through time, although those changes do not appear to be associated with changes in pond density. At sites where predators were excluded, nest success did not vary with time but varied positively with pond density in the previous year, although that effect was tempered by high pond density in the year of observation. At sites where predators were removed but could emigrate back into study plots, nest success varied widely over time and we found no evidence of an effect of pond density. We show that nest success of dabbling ducks is higher under predator management than at sites without predator management, and that this relationship varies with climatic conditions, possibly related to complex interactions within and among duck species, their predators, and their prey.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".