Factors influencing the diversity and abundance of grassland birds in the Waterton Foothills Parkland, Alberta, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Grassland birds are among the most imperilled taxa in North America, with declines being primarily associated with the widespread conversion of grasslands for agriculture. However, alteration of existing vegetation communities and the landscape context in which habitats occur can be important factors affecting the use of remaining grassland habitats by birds. The Waterton Foothills Parkland region in southern Alberta, Canada is characterized by complex topography consisting of native grassland-forest-wetland mosaics. In this thesis, I used naturally occurring landscape heterogeneity and management-relevant habitat metrics to evaluate multi-scale ecological responses of grassland birds. I evaluated how the presence, abundance, and diversity of grassland birds responded to their habitat using Autonomous Recording Units, in-field vegetation surveys, and spatial landscape assessments. I found that the grassland bird community mostly responded to grassland fragmentation and topography within 400 to 800 m extents. Fragmentation increased the total diversity of grassland birds because spillover of facultative grassland birds at edges was greater than decreases in the diversity of a limited pool of obligate species in more fragmented landscapes. Sites with more rugged terrain was autocorrelated with native grasslands, suggesting that landscape-scale responses of grassland birds to terrain ruggedness were associated with the distribution of different grassland types. Local measures of grassland type represented by the percent composition of non-native species and rangeland health were key determinants of the grassland bird community. Healthy, native grasslands supported higher abundances of Vesper and Clay-coloured Sparrows and unhealthy, modified grasslands supported more Savannah Sparrows and Western Meadowlarks. This research supports that sections and quarter-sections of land are informative units for examining the abundance and diversity of grassland birds in the Waterton Foothills Parkland based on responses of the grassland community to grassland fragmentation, topography, non-native vegetation invasion, and range health.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".