Effects of hunting on the demographics, movement, and habitat selection of American black bears (Ursus americanus)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I conducted a large-scale experiment to determine the effects of hunting on the demographics and behaviour of American black bears (Ursus americanus ). I monitored 290 bears, a subset of which were equipped with VHF and GPS radio-collars, in 2 hunted areas and an adjoining unhunted area in the boreal forest of Alberta, Canada, during a 4-year study (2002-2005). I implemented a modified before-after control-impact (BACI) design whereby bait sites for hunting were closed in 1 of the 2 hunted study areas in years 3 and 4 and adult males in an unhunted area were removed in year 3. I found population density to be the most important factor affecting population parameters and suggest that the potential effects of sexually selected infanticide (SSI), if it exists, are negligible in populations reduced below carrying capacity (K). I show that spatial and temporal movements of females with cubs were most influenced by the density of female neighbors. This differs from current interpretations of female movement where food availability and male avoidance are suggested as the main determinants. Lastly, I found that females with cubs adjusted their habitat selection in response to the probability of encountering a male and reduced their selection for high-quality habitats as the density of adult males increased. These results demonstrate that population density is the most important factor regulating behaviour and demographic parameters. Therefore, black bears can be harvested sustainably without concern for potential indirect effects such as increased infanticide and reduced productivity of females.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 |
| 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".