An experimental test of food limitation and trophic interaction hypotheses on demographic parameters in a cyclic population of red-backed voles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Determining the factors that limit and regulate population density is a key problem in population ecology, but often difficult to test in practice. The northern red-backed vole ( Clethrionomys rutilis Pallas, 1779 sec. Kryštufek et al. 2020) occurs throughout the boreal forests of the northern hemisphere and the factors influencing their populations are still being elucidated. A large-scale experiment was conducted in the Yukon from 1986 to 1996 in which food availability, nutrient availability, predation, and interspecific competition were experimentally manipulated. Paradoxically, there was no evidence that these experimental treatments altered vole population density. Here, we apply a capture–mark–recapture modeling framework to test for experimental treatment effects on recruitment and apparent survival. Experimental manipulations resulted in opposing effects on recruitment and apparent survival. These contrasting demographic effects meant that the population growth rate and density remained unaffected by experimental treatments, upholding the original results. We suggest that as some experimental areas became more saturated with voles, this forced higher levels of vole dispersal or attracted mustelid or avian predators, either of which could result in the contrasting effect on apparent survival. Our results highlight that manipulation of environmental factors can alter demographic parameters without substantially affecting overall abundance.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".