Artificial supplementary food influences hedgehog occupancy and activity patterns more than predator presence or natural food availability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Supplementary feeding for declining hedgehog Erinaceus europaeus populations is popular in Great Britain and has been suggested as an important factor in explaining higher densities in urban areas compared with rural ones. Occupancy modelling was used to test whether spatial variation in supplementary feeding, natural food, habitat, or predator presence best explained patterns of hedgehog occupancy and diel activity. Supplementary food and urban habitats had a strong effect on hedgehog occupancy and detection, with all supplementary feeding sites recording hedgehog presence. Natural prey availability and the presence of predators was relatively higher in rural areas, and although the top‐ranked occupancy models (AIC < 2) contained natural food and predator covariates, the strength of these relationships was negative and non‐significant. This suggests local hedgehog site use is influenced by access to artificial supplementary feeding in urban areas. There was no significant difference in diel activity overlap between rural, urban, and urban feeding sites, but peaks in activity early in the activity period suggest preferential access to feeding site by hedgehogs compared with later in the evening. This is the first study to show the importance of supplementary feeding as a covariate of hedgehog occupancy in relation to natural food availability, and we recommend that future studies quantify supplementary feeding in population and distribution studies of urban mammals.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 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 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".