Predator control alters wolf interactions with prey and competitor species over the diel cycle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Predator control remains one of the most common strategies for the conservation of threatened prey species. Despite significant and ongoing efforts to reduce predator populations, little is known about the impacts on the behaviour and interactions of target and non‐target species following numerical and potentially behavioural suppression of predators. We used camera‐trap data collected before and after an intensive wolf control program in northeastern Alberta's boreal forest to evaluate changes in activity patterns and overlap in wolves, competitors and prey. We hypothesized wolves would shift their activity toward increased nocturnality to avoid diurnal control efforts, and thereby cause a behavioural cascade where other species shift activity to maintain temporal segregation from wolves. Wolves shifted activity into the nighttime following predator control, reducing temporal overlap with the other, mostly diurnal, members of the community. Decreases in activity overlap between wolves and other species indicates reduced potential for wolf interactions with ungulate prey and large competitor species. Predator control may therefore not only release species from top to down regulation and competition following numerical suppression of top predators, but also through de‐coupling of temporal overlap, with potential effects on species interactions. Understanding the indirect impacts of conservation strategies such as predator control on both target and non‐target species provides insight into potential disruptions to top–down regulation and the associated species interactions that shape community structure.
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) | 0.006 | 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".