North American river otter habitat suitability and human–wildlife coexistence on Protection Island, British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Land use change and urban sprawl increase the likelihood of encounters between humans and wildlife. North American river otters (Lontra canadensis) coexist (and also conflict) with humans in many places, including on Protection Island, British Columbia, Canada. River otters are sensitive to, yet also inhabit, environments with relatively high levels of anthropogenic disturbance. From June to November 2022, we investigated the effect of anthropogenic factors on river otter use of space and behavior. We modeled the relative importance of anthropogenic (e.g., distance to buildings and roads, level of human use of docks), environmental (e.g., land cover type), and topographic (elevation) variables for habitat suitability in wild river otters on Protection Island using maximum entropy (MaxEnt) species distribution models, from 660 occurrence points collected. We conducted 178 behavioral scan samples (containing 594 observations) from direct‐observation video and motion‐triggered trail camera video to evaluate behavioral differences associated with the use of an anthropogenic habitat feature, docks (a potential attractant), and land. We found that the most suitable areas for river otters in this study were near docks (at all levels of human use), near water or wetlands (within ~25 m of the water), and had intermediate densities of driftwood. Further, our findings indicated that human activities generally did not impede otter use of space — river otters and humans were able to coexist in this semi‐urban context. Behaviors on docks differed from behaviors on land, and river otters used docks more than would be expected by chance overall, and specifically overnight, and used docks for individual and social activities. Our case study suggests that anthropogenic and environmental factors are key habitat suitability predictors for river otters, and that in populations habituated to human presence, docks may act as a habitat attractant. This case can inform conservation and management practices for river otters, other flagship species, and the ecosystems they inhabit, enhancing human–wildlife coexistence in anthropogenic landscapes.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".