Sharp-tailed Grouse increase site use after prescribed fire but not mechanical treatments during the fall
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the Great Lakes Region, Sharp-tailed Grouse (Tympanuchus phasianellus) use open habitats of grass and brush that require frequent management. Wildlife managers expressed concern that Sharp-tailed Grouse were not responding to management throughout the year, so we examined responses to prescribed fire and mechanical treatment (mowing or shearing) conducted during the fall. We surveyed Sharp-tailed Grouse use and vegetation at 15 mechanical treatments, 10 prescribed burns, and 25 control sites in a before-after-control-impact-paired design. We surveyed Sharp-tailed Grouse use before management, and one week, one month, one year, and three years after management by conducting fecal pellet surveys along transects at each site. Sharp-tailed Grouse responses, as indicated by differences between fecal pellet counts at treatments and paired controls during each survey, increased following prescribed fire, but did not change after mechanical treatments. However, increased Sharp-tailed Grouse use following prescribed fire was temporary, thus management should be conducted at least once every three years at each site. Changes in vegetation metrics at managed sites were also temporary and most metrics returned to pre-treatment levels after one year, although shrub height at sites that received mechanical treatments and the forb response following prescribed fire persisted for > 3 years. We suggest that fall prescribed fire is more effective at increasing Sharp-tailed Grouse use of sites than fall mechanical treatment, which could be due to differences in vegetation responses, site size, landscape context, or cues produced by fire that attract Sharp-tailed Grouse. However, mechanical treatments maintain Sharp-tailed Grouse habitat, and without management, unchecked woody encroachment reduces habitat. Targeting mowing and shearing at sites known to be used by Sharp-tailed Grouse may prioritize management activities to sites that will have the most impact. Prescribed fire and mechanical treatments produced different Sharp-tailed Grouse and vegetation responses in the fall and should be used to address different management objectives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".