Use and selection of highway bridges by Rafinesqueâs big-eared bats in South Carolina
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rafinesque’s big-eared bats (Corynorhinus rafinesquii) occur throughout the South and into some Midwestern states. However, they are rare throughout their range and are considered to be a species of special concern in every state in which they occur. Previous studies have documented the use of bridges by Rafinesque’s big-eared bats in Louisiana, Mississippi, and North Carolina, but information on bridge use across the range is lacking. Furthermore, two of the three studies on bridge use were conducted in national forests. Thus, our objective was to determine the use and selection of bridges as day roosts by Rafinesque’s big-eared bats on all public roads in South Carolina. We surveyed 1,129 bridges within all 46 counties from May to August 2002. During the summer of 2003, we monitored 236 bridges in previously occupied areas of the state one to five times to evaluate bridge-roost fidelity. Colonies (including maternal groups) and solitary big-eared bats were found beneath 38 bridges in 2002 and 55 bridges in 2003. Occupancy in both years was strongly influenced by bridge size (P < 0.001) and construction type (P < 0.001); bats selected large, concrete-girder bridges and avoided flat-bottomed, slab bridges. Rafinesque’s big-eared bats occupied bridges in the Upper and Lower Coastal Plain, but were absent from bridges in the Piedmont and Blue Ridge Mountains. Big-eared bats demonstrated a high degree of roost fidelity (65.9 percent). We also found that checking bridges three times at two-week intervals ensured the detection of bats, but checking more than three times did not increase detection probabilities. The high degree of fidelity and use by maternal groups suggest that highway bridges are important roosting sites for Rafinesque’s big-eared bats in the South Carolina Coastal Plain. Our results also suggest that if repair or maintenance work is planned for girder bridges during the summer, they should be inspected three times over a four to six week period. Because other studies have shown that Rafinesque’s big-eared bats rarely use bridges during winter, delaying work on occupied bridges until that time will aid in the conservation of this rare species. Biographical Sketch: Frances Bennett completed an honor’s degree in biology from the University of Saskatchewan in 1999, after which she worked as a field biologist for three years in eastern Canada for provincial and federal agencies and Acadia University. She attended Clemson University to complete a master’s degree in environmental/wildlife toxicology from 2002-2004, where she conducted a statewide survey for Rafinesque’s big-eared bats in South Carolina and also carried out an assessment of metal exposure in these bats. Ms. Bennett attends the University of Cincinnati, where she plans to continue her research into the effects of environmental contaminants on insectivorous bats.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".