Use of Nest Shelters by American Common Eiders (Somateria mollissima dresseri): Occupancy Rates and Effects of Shelter Type on Nest Microclimate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Artificial nest shelters have long been used as a conservation tool for waterfowl management to provide safe nesting sites and improve breeding success of local populations. We examined occupancy rates, temperature, and humidity in 2 nest-shelter types provided for Somateria mollissima dresseri (American Common Eider) on coastal islands in the Eastern Shore Islands Wildlife Management Area, NS, Canada. We placed temperature and humidity loggers inside existing plastic barrel shelters, newly designed wooden A-frame shelters, and in natural nesting habitat on 3 islands. The annual proportion of shelters used for each shelter type varied considerably among islands, but we found no difference between the occupancy rates of wooden A-frame shelters (40%) and plastic barrels (39%). We found that wooden A-frame shelters closely mimicked daily mean temperature and humidity in natural nesting habitat, whereas barrel shelters created much hotter, drier conditions compared to natural nesting habitat and A-frame shelters. We suspect microclimate conditions under plastic barrels may cause dehydration for nesting eiders and lead to adverse effects. Therefore, we recommend the removal of plastic barrel shelters from eider colonies. Further research is needed to confirm whether A-frame shelters reduce rates of predation on eider hens and their eggs by large gulls and eagles compared to natural nesting habitat.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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".