The Windy City rookery: Movement and activity patterns of Black-crowned Night Herons (Nycticorax nycticorax) in a human-dominated landscape
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As urbanization continues to accelerate, human-dominated habitats are becoming increasingly important for wildlife as some species of conservation concern move into urban landscapes. In response to the widespread loss or conversion of their preferred wetland habitat, Black-crowned Night Herons (Nycticorax nycticorax; BCNH) frequently nest in urban areas. Despite being the most widely distributed colonial wading bird in the world, BCNH face population declines and have been listed as a special-status species in 11 U.S. states and Ontario, Canada. The largest remaining BCNH rookery in the Great Lakes region of the U.S. is located at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, Illinois. Although nesting in an urban center is inherently risky, this colony appears to be thriving. We used GPS/GSM satellite transmitters to better understand the home range size, habitat use, and activity patterns of individual birds during the breeding season. We found that BCNH foraged in a wide variety of natural and highly modified waterbodies and exhibited distinct behavioral differences between breeding and non-breeding birds. Non-breeding birds’ home ranges were on average 18 times larger than those of breeding birds, which primarily foraged within 10 km of the colony, while non-breeding birds ranged widely but continued to use relatively urban habitats. All birds were active throughout the 24-hour period, but breeding BCNH showed higher activity rates than non-breeding birds throughout the diel cycle. Understanding the behavior of this declining species within urban landscapes can improve our understanding of this species’ ecology and provide valuable insights to inform management and conservation efforts.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".