Microhabitat and stopover site selection by juvenile Western Rattlesnakes (Crotalus oreganus)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studies on habitat selection are central to our understanding of animal ecology and play an important role in the conservation and management of species. However, habitat selection is not necessarily consistent across sectors of populations and failing to understand both similarities and differences between age classes, for instance, may be problematic. Knowledge on habitat use by juvenile vertebrates in general is sorely lacking, particularly for species with precocial offspring, and here we address this gap by describing habitat use by juvenile Western Rattlesnakes ( Crotalus oreganus ). We measured habitat at two scales for radio-telemetered juvenile snakes along active-season movement paths at a site in southern British Columbia, Canada, where seasonal migrations and habitat associations of adult animals have been particularly well studied. Despite the relatively short distances these animals travelled and their diminutive size, we found there was selection for structurally stable cover (e.g., woody debris, shrub, and rock cover) similar to that documented for adult snakes in the same region. Additionally, we tested for differences in microhabitat features at sites used for short-duration (fewer than seven days) and long-duration (seven days or longer) stopovers: we detected negative selection for leaf litter at long-duration stopover sites, but otherwise identified no difference in the microhabitat features associated with these two categories of locations. Overall, this study contributes rare data to our growing understanding of the complexity of habitat requirements for migratory snake species, including northern crotalid vipers, while underscoring the crucial role of habitat selection research across all segments of populations. Comparative data on habitat selection by early-age classes within reptile populations informs conservation planning for the long-term survival of wild populations.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| 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".