Summer foraging habitat suitability for highly mobile male beluga whales in the Eastern Beaufort Sea and Arctic Archipelago
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Eastern Beaufort Sea belugas face threats from increasing vessel traffic and decreasing availability of Arctic cod driven by climate change. This necessitates an improved understanding of the environmental drivers of their foraging habitat suitability to make predictions on the consequences of climate change and to inform management decisions. We incorporated animal behaviour into habitat suitability models through comparing the locations of dives associated with foraging with randomly selected locations to quantify summer habitat preferences. We tested whether environmental drivers associated with foraging dives varied between months (July/August) and years (2018/2019). Seafloor depth (350–750 m) was the most important variable determining foraging habitat suitability and was consistent between years. Studies on beluga diet alongside these results suggest that foraging habitat suitability is primarily driven by the presence of Arctic cod. Belugas consistently targeted bathymetric regimes irrespective of ice conditions, suggesting that sites in the Beaufort Sea and Arctic Archipelago may maintain suitable foraging habitat under near-future changes in sea ice. As vessel traffic is predicted to increase in these regions as seasonal sea ice declines, these results can be incorporated into management decisions to identify areas of conservation interest to mitigate possible acoustic threats to beluga whales.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.001 | 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".