INVESTIGATION OF THE HABITAT AND CLIMATE DRIVERS OF COLLARED PIKA DISTRIBUTION AND VULNERABILITY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As environmental conditions continue to change at a rapid rate, understanding habitat requirements and climate vulnerabilities is critical for species conservation. The collared pika (Ochotona collaris), an alpine specialist found in Alaska and northern Canada, faces potential threats from climate change, yet its habitat requirements and responses to environmental change remain poorly understood. In this study, we use existing spatial data, combined with observations from new survey efforts, to 1) identify regional variation in collared pika habitat preferences and climate response, and 2) assess the climate change vulnerability of collared pikas and predict changes in distribution linked to future climate scenarios. To identify habitat preferences, we used a model selection approach, comparing climate and habitat characteristics at known collared pika occurrences to those at surrounding areas. Our analysis indicated that collared pika occurrence is primarily driven by the presence of talus, proximity to the talus edge (with pikas preferring areas closer to vegetation), and talus patch size (with pikas preferring small patches). The rangewide model indicated that collared pika occurrence was positively correlated with maximum winter temperature and negatively correlated with maximum summer temperature, annual precipitation, and solar radiation. While preferences for talus characteristics remained consistent rangewide, the effect of climate variables including precipitation and maximum summer temperature varied regionally. To assess climate vulnerability, we combined trait-based and correlative modeling approaches, with the results suggesting the species has high vulnerability to climate change. Our trait-based assessment indicated that collared pikas are moderately susceptible to climate change due to high exposure to changing conditions, high sensitivity to climatic variables, and low adaptive capacity. To predict future changes in distribution, we employed a presence-background species distribution modeling technique to identify the current climatic niche and projected this model into future climate scenarios. Our models suggest a loss of ~55-70% of climatically suitable areas by 2080. Together, these results inform conservation status and strategies for this species and highlight the importance of conducting regional and species-specific analyses.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".