Alaska’s climate sensitive Yukon–Kuskokwim Delta supports seven million Arctic-breeding shorebirds, including the majority of six North American populations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Baseline information about declining North American shorebird populations is essential to determine the effects of global warming at low-lying coastal areas of the Arctic and subarctic, where numerous taxa breed, and to assess population recovery throughout their range. We estimated population sizes on the Yukon–Kuskokwim Delta (YKD) in western Alaska on the eastern edge of the Bering Sea. We conducted ground-based surveys during 2015 and 2016 at 589 randomly selected plots from an area of 35,769 km2. We used stratified random sampling in 8 physiographic strata and corrected population estimates using detection ratios derived from double sampling on a subset of plots. We detected 11,110 breeding individuals of 21 taxa. Western Sandpiper (Calidris mauri), Red-necked Phalarope (Phalaropus lobatus), Dunlin (subspecies C. alpina pacifica), and Wilson’s Snipe (Gallinago delicata) were the most abundant taxa. We estimated that ~7 million individual shorebirds were breeding on the entire YKD in 2015 and 2016. Our surveys of this region provided robust population estimates (coefficient of variations ≤ 0.35) for 14 species. Our results indicate that the YKD supports a large proportion of North America’s breeding populations of the Pacific Golden-Plover (Pluvialis fulva), the western population of a Whimbrel subspecies (Numenius phaeopus hudsonicus), a Bar-tailed Godwit subspecies (Limosa lapponica baueri), Black Turnstone (Arenaria melanocephala), a Dunlin subspecies (C. alpina pacifica), and Western Sandpiper. Our study highlights the importance of breeding shorebirds of this relatively pristine but climatically sensitive deltaic system. Estuaries and deltaic systems worldwide are rapidly being degraded by anthropogenic activities. Our population estimates can be used to refine prior North American population estimates, determine the effects of global warming, and evaluate conservation success by measuring population change 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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".