Effect of Habitat Supply, Behaviour-Restricted Habitat Selection, and Landscape Change on Wood Bison Carrying Capacity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Ronald Lake wood bison (Bison bison athabascae) population is one of two disease-free and free-ranging wood bison populations in Alberta, Canada. Managing the population would benefit from a better understanding of how habitat, behaviour, and landscape change influence carrying capacity. Here, I compare changes in carrying capacity for the population using habitat supply, behaviour-restricted habitat selection, and simplified scenarios of habitat loss, enhancement, and change within the bison’s core winter range. Resulting carrying capacity estimates include consideration of available forage biomass, wood bison energetic requirements, and foraging constraints, such as diet composition and forage offtake. The maximum nutritional potential of bison forage in the core range in winter could support 1,947 to 3,711 bison at a mean bison density of 2.01 bison/km2. However, when considering the habitats used by bison from GPS telemetry data (behaviour-restricted habitat selection), carrying capacity is reduced by ~90% to 210–371 individuals or a mean bison density of 0.21 bison/km2. Simplified scenarios examined how both the maximum nutritional and behaviour-restricted carrying capacity estimates changed alongside habitat loss through potential industrial development, theoretical habitat enhancement post-mining, and climate change-induced drying of wetlands over the short- and long-term. The habitat loss scenario had greater reductions from the nutritional maximum carrying capacity baseline for the Ronald Lake wood bison population than the short- and long-term habitat drying scenarios (loss -10.1%, short-term -6.2%, long-term -8.5%). However, these trends were reversed for the behavioural-restricted method, in which the habitat drying scenarios had a much larger reduction from the baseline carrying capacity than the scenario of potential habitat loss (loss -10.7%, short-term -33.8%, long-term -54.8%). Although many assumptions and limitations are associated with carrying capacity estimates, a comparative approach for assessing habitat supply can help guide management of wildlife populations in dynamic landscapes.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".