Thermal characteristics of overwintering habitats for the Blanding’s Turtle (Emydoidea blandingii) across three study areas in Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Habitat restoration is a necessary strategy to protect populations of Blanding’s Turtles (Emydoidea blandingii) living in settled areas. Relatively little is known about thermal tolerances and requirements of this species in situ during the overwintering period, except that these turtles must find water bodies that do not freeze completely and that are sufficiently cool to allow them to stay dormant throughout the winter. We used water temperature data associated with Blanding’s Turtle populations in a northern, central, and southern study area within Ontario, Canada to determine thermal characteristics of occupied overwintering habitats. From fall through spring from 2012 to 2014, we measured water temperature of 20 potential overwintering habitats within the three study areas. We also radio tracked 48 adult turtles to determine which habitats they occupied during winter. Water temperatures of all occupied habitats ranged from 0.44° C to 3.68° C, with a mean of 1.77° C (± 0.03° C), and showed slow steady declines throughout the overwintering period. Regardless of location, average water temperatures at all confirmed overwintering habitats remained above the freezing point of turtle body fluids (-0.6° C). Average water temperature at five of the six confirmed overwintering habitats never dropped below 0° C, but dropped to -0.33° C for eight days at the sixth overwintering habitat. Determining thermal parameters of overwintering sites can provide knowledge useful for habitat restoration and creation to ensure habitats provide suitable overwintering conditions in the face of global climate change.
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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 | 0.002 | 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".