Habitat Selection by Sandhill Cranes (Antigone canadensis) in Alberta using passive acoustics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The mid-continent population of Sandhill Cranes (Antigone canadensis) is the largest population of cranes in North America. Alberta has a large migratory Sandhill Crane population, with the Rocky Mountains acting as a choke point funneling birds through the province as they move north to the Canadian territories, Alaska, and Siberia. But Alberta has a small nesting population, and to date no studies have been conducted on nesting Sandhill Cranes in the province. Alberta’s Boreal Forest ecosystem varies substantially from southern Sandhill Crane nesting habitat and conventional nesting habitat selection may not apply to much of Alberta’s nesting population. The primary goal of this study is to reduce the knowledge gap surrounding Alberta’s Sandhill Crane population and what they require for breeding habitat. Using a systematic random sampling design, and autonomous recording units deployed by the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute, we demonstrated the viability of using passive acoustics to estimate resource selection functions to identify high-quality nesting season habitats in Alberta, while also determining the effects of weather on migratory behaviour. We estimated a resource selection function during the Sandhill Crane nesting season using a used/available design, while using k-fold cross validation to validate our map of the Sandhill Crane nesting habitats across northern Alberta. We then examined the effect of weather conditions on flight behaviour during the spring migration using a generalized linear mixed-effect model. Cranes selected for bogs and fens for breeding but avoided high canopy closure, areas of high forest harvest, and crop land. While on spring migration the cranes selected habitat similarly to the nesting season although they did not appear to be selecting against areas of forest harvest. We found that in tandem with selected landcover, a reduction in average daily barometric pressure from the day previous had the greatest grounding effect on migratory flight behaviour with the change in barometric pressure performing better than just landscape features alone, but the lack of covariate significance did limit our ability to make inferences on this effect. Our map of nesting season Sandhill Crane habitat can serve as an effective tool for understanding and preserving high quality Sandhill Crane habitat in Alberta, while the high predictability of our model illustrates the viability of resource selection functions with passive acoustic data.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".