Seasonal and Spatial Variations in Densities of Marbled Murrelets <i>Brachyramphus marmoratus</i> off Southwestern Vancouver Island
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ocean off Vancouver Island, British Columbia, is a productive area supporting diverse marine life, including a globally important breeding population of Marbled Murrelets Brachyramphus marmoratus. We report on the year-round at-sea distribution and densities of this murrelet off southwestern Vancouver Island based on monthly vessel surveys in 1993–2000. Surveys covered three ocean zones: Nearshore (sheltered waters, usually < 20 m deep, within 1–2 km of shore; 69 surveys), Inshore (exposed coastal waters, < 50 m deep, within 6 km of shore; 38 surveys), and Offshore (exposed open seas over the continental shelf, > 50 m deep, generally > 6 km from shore; 29 surveys). Year-round mean densities (± standard deviation, in birds/km²) for Nearshore, Inshore, and Offshore waters were 4.5 ± 5.8, 1.5 ± 1.2, and 0.2 ± 0.2, respectively. During peak breeding season (May–July), densities were 13.7 ± 2.3, 3.3 ± 0.2, and 0.2 ± 0.1 birds/km², respectively. Our data confirm that most murrelets leave this area outside of the breeding season, and very few move into the open ocean at this time. Post-breeding movements, molt locations, and winter distribution of these birds remain poorly known, highlighting the need for more surveys outside the breeding season and across the murrelet’s range. Due to high vessel traffic, including many oil tankers, and ongoing chronic oil spills, murrelets off southwestern Vancouver Island are exposed to high risk of oil pollution, particularly during the summer and close to shore. Gill nets and disturbance from boats are additional risks.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".