Identifying the mechanisms of prey switching in terrestrial wildlife: A protocol for a systematic literature review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Predators switch prey when they alter their consumption towards a prey species in a manner that is disproportionately greater than would be expected when the prey species is highly abundant and disproportionately lower than expected when the prey species is at low abundance. Prey switching can stabilize populations, simultaneously inhibiting both extinction and overpopulation of prey and predators. However, prey switching is not universal in multi‐prey systems, with some predators preferring one prey species regardless of its relative abundance. With the implications for conservation and management, predator diet selection has been studied across diverse systems. Here, we harness the abundance of literature and conduct a systematic review to determine the occurrence of prey switching in nature and to identify the factors and conditions which produce changes in prey preferences. We will test for relationships between relative prey densities and relative consumption rates to identify a ‘tipping point’ at which predators switch prey. We will determine factors which influence this relationship, such as taxa, sociality, species biomass, ecosystem productivity, and predator condition and identity. Practical implication . Disentangling when and why prey switching occurs will significantly impact conservation, ecosystem management and human–wildlife conflicts.
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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 | 0.002 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".