Evaluating Viability of Woodland Caribou in Banff and Jasper National Parks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recovery of endangered species may require a combination of protection and conservation action. In Banff National Park, the southernmost population of woodland caribou in Alberta was extirpated by an avalanche in April 2009. Concurrently, two of three populations in neighboring Jasper National Park have declined to alarming numbers (≤10). These trends reflect an uncertain future for these populations of woodland caribou despite protection within Canada’s Rocky Mountain national parks. We used population viability analysis to assess the potential for caribou persistence in Banff and \nJasper National Parks with and without translocation‐based management. We constructed a female‐based projection matrix to model caribou life history and population growth among the Banff, Brazeau, Maligne, and Tonquin populations. Input vital rates included population‐specific estimates of mean adult female survival and calf/cow ratio‐based estimates of mean fecundity, with process variance isolated for each. Our results suggested the Tonquin caribou population within Jasper is likely to remain viable without management action. However, almost certain extirpation is predicted for the Brazeau and Maligne populations, with median times to extinction of 16 years and low likelihoods of persistence \neven after translocation efforts. Simulations reintroducing 45 female caribou into Banff resulted in a 66–99% chance of ≥8 females remaining after 20 years, making Banff a candidate for reintroduction. However, before translocations are adopted as a recovery tool, we encourage validation of our assumptions that the original causes of extirpation have been addressed and consideration of the challenges of conducting reintroductions to the edge of species’ climatic niches.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 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) | 0.001 | 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 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".