Quantifying recovery of British Columbia's South Selkirk grizzly bear population
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Small, isolated wildlife populations are often at great conservation risk. Quantitative monitoring of their conservation status over time and evidence of recovery is relatively rare. We carried out population surveys of grizzly bears (Ursus arctos) pre– (2005) and post– (2020–2021) conservation management, to assess the efficacy of strategic measures applied to the at-risk Canadian South Selkirk grizzly bear population in southeastern British Columbia. We evaluated our management outcomes by comparing our recent survey results with recovery targets outlined in a 2016 Recovery Management Plan, which included abundance, trend, number and distribution of females, distribution of reproductive females, mortality rates, and inter-population connectivity. Surveys consisted of remote genetic sampling where DNA from hair roots generated genotypes identifying individuals, sex, and family units. In 2020–2021, we identified 73 individuals (41 females, 32 males) that were used in a spatially explicit capture–recapture (SECR) density estimate, and 8 individuals sampled opportunistically at rub sites that were used in our connectivity analysis. We estimated the average number of bears using the area at any one time to be 69 (95% CI = 56–86). This estimate exceeded our closure-corrected recovery target of 60 bears. Densities were highest in the northern and central portions of the area, but the average density was estimated to be 17 grizzly bears/1,000 km2 (95% CI = 14–22). Female distribution and evidence of reproduction varied spatially but occurred in all 6 delineated subunits, which exceeded our target of occurring in 5 subunits. Human-caused female mortality reported over the past 6 years was 0.5 bears/year, well below our target of 1 bear/year. We identified 9 immigrants (1F, 8M) from the Purcell Mountains who bred 27 offspring (12F, 15M) with other South Selkirk mates. This level of connectivity and gene flow represented a substantial increase for this previously fragmented population. Our results suggest that 15 years of conservation management have significantly improved the status of the Canadian South Selkirk grizzly bear population.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.002 | 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".