Stable isotopes indicate reduced body condition of caribou in disturbed areas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Understanding the impacts of disturbance on individual fitness is important for wildlife management, and critical for the conservation of species at risk. We compared the fitness and seasonal range use of 39 woodland caribou in Ontario study areas contrasted by their level of human disturbance. We previously showed that wolf density in the disturbed site was higher, likely due to human-modified landscapes favoring moose, the primary prey of wolves. In this paper we address three objectives. First, because the assimilation of dietary nitrogen is heavily influenced by metabolic processes related to stress, we hypothesized that ratios of nitrogen isotopes ( N) may indicate changes in body condition in ungulates and be useful proxies for changes in fitness. Second, we predicted that increased predation risk from wolves in disturbed areas would result in measurable declines in caribou body condition. Third, we hypothesized that one mechanism for fitness declines among caribou in the disturbed area was increased wolf activity restricting caribou seasonal movements. We showed change in N in the tissues of caribou was correlated with body condition scoring using fat assessment. We used GPS collars to quantify seasonal range use and found that fitness was higher, and seasonal range overlap was lower, in caribou using the nondisturbed area. Winter fitness declines were significantly larger in the more disturbed area. Our study identifies another mechanism by which the cumulative effects of human-disturbed landscapes on caribou fitness could contribute to global declines in caribou populations.
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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) | 0.003 | 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".