Status of spectacled eiders (Somateria fischeri) on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, Alaska, 2022—Testing and updating predictive models
Bibliographic record
Abstract
First posted July 25, 2023 For additional information, contact: Director, Alaska Science CenterU.S. Geological Survey4210 University DriveAnchorage, Alaska 99508 The nesting biology and demography of spectacled eiders (Somateria fischeri) along the lower Kashunuk River on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, Alaska, were studied from 1993 to 2002. This previous work demonstrated that the breeding population on the study area was declining, and demographic modeling predicted that the population would continue to decline from 2002 forward. The predicted decline was primarily because of lead shot in tundra wetlands in the area, exposure of nesting females to lead, resulting in low adult female survival. The model predicted that lead pellets already in wetlands would slowly settle beyond the foraging depth of eiders, and that, lead exposure rates would decline. The goal of this project was to test this prediction by revisiting the lower Kashunuk River study area in 2022 to (1) update previous datasets regarding demographic parameters and (2) validate (or refute) existing models relative to lead exposure rates and the effects of lead on population dynamics. In the summer of 2022, a total of 37 nests were found in a sub-area of the historical study area. Comparing to past efforts in this same sub-area, more nests were found than predicted but the proportion of nesting female spectacled eiders exposed to lead in 2022 (24.3 percent) was still similar to levels of exposure observed between 1994 and 2002 (28.5 percent). Thus, data from the 2022 survey suggests that the earlier decline in numbers of nesting spectacled eiders has reversed, but there has been little decrease in lead exposure over time.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".