Seasonal scatology of wolves along the Dempster Highway, northwestern Canada-an introduction of pollen analysis for dating old scats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study aims to renovate the method of studying seasonal variation in wolf diet by introducing simultaneous analysis of undigested residua and pollen grains in wolf scats collected regardless of their freshness over a short period of time, in which pollen grains help to identify the season the diet was taken. The present study was conducted over a range of 500 km along the Dempster Highway extending north from Dawson, Yukon Territory to Inuvik, the Northwest Territories, Canada. We collected a total of 24 wolf scats along side roads and rivers, in which as many as 14 million pollen grains/scat were found on an average. The analysis revealed that the wolves relied exclusively on the caribou during winter when scats are free of pollen grains, but increase their dependence on the beaver and other mammals up to over 50% in term of residuum occurrence in spring and summer when scats are respectively loaded primarily with arboreal and herbaceous pollen grains. This result was consistent with the local fauna of prey animals, the migration pattern of the caribou for breeding and wintering, availability of the beaver and other rodents as dictated by ice/snow cover, and breeding and cub rearing pattern of the wolves themselves. Thus it was concluded that the pollen analysis serves as a powerful and effective tool for identifying the seasonality of old scats, and therefore saves a great deal of time and effort to be devoted to finding fresh scats.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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 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".