Occupancy modeling of habitat use by white‐tailed deer after more than a decade of exclusion in the boreal forest
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The exclusion of herbivores in forest areas is a strategy used to reduce the impact of selective browsing and increase the regeneration of desired plant species. On Anticosti Island (Québec, Canada), selective browsing by white‐tailed deer prevents the regeneration of balsam fir – white birch forests leading to their conversion into white spruce forests. Large deer exclosures were established for ca 10–12 years in clear‐cuts with patches of residual forest from 2001 to 2006 to assist in the natural regeneration of fir stands and to provide shelter and food resources for deer. Our objective was to assess how deer use exclosures after the removal of fences according to their spatial configuration and habitat composition. We randomly distributed automatic cameras for periods of 14 days during summer in six exclosures ranging from 3.1 to 11.2 km 2 (n = 25 cameras per exclosure) from which deer were reduced for 10–12 years. We compared candidate occupancy models that included spatial configuration and food resource variables while simultaneously controlling for variables affecting detection probability. We obtained weak evidence that deer habitat use increased by 19% when forage resources, represented by the cover of Cornus canadensis , increased from 0 to 100%. None of the other variables (distance between the border of exclosures and cameras and distance between forest patches and cameras) was retained, suggesting that the use of regenerating forests by deer in summer after a period of exclusion is related to forage availability and therefore, any forest management that improves food production during summer should help maintain or increase habitat use by deer.
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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".