Muskox «Ovibos moschatus» habitat associations and interactions with caribou «Rangifer tarandus»
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Muskox (Ovibos moschatus) are a large-bodied arctic herbivore that occupy habitats used seasonally by migratory caribou (Rangifer tarandus). Muskox were reintroduced to the North Slope of Alaska in 1970 and mixed-sex groups have been reported in the Yukon North Slope and the Richardson Mountains since 1985. Their reintroduction has sparked concerns from local hunters and community members worried about the impact of muskox on caribou populations and vegetation. This thesis represents an ecological assessment of competition potential and habitat segregation among two arctic ungulates and community-based research that addresses local concerns and knowledge priorities. In the first part of the thesis, I use satellite collar data from muskox and caribou to analyze their spatial and habitat overlap through range overlap, encounter rates, and resource selection functions. Range overlap was at its highest in the spring and summer months, but less than 1% of collared caribou encountered a muskox during that period. Habitat overlap was minimized through differential selection of elevation, distance to water, and abundant tussock habitat. In the second part of the thesis, I use ground-based vegetationsampling to characterize fine-scale muskox-vegetation associations, determining whether there arepositive or negative associations between muskox use and vegetation presence and abundance. Positive associations between muskox use and vegetation attributes were deemed to reflect a pattern of fine-scale selection, and negative associations were deemed to be the reflection of muskox herbivory impacts. Positive associations were found between muskox use and lichen, willow, and graminoid abundance and presence, an indication that within land covers, the relationship between muskox use and vegetation is mostly driven by selection rather than by herbivory. Collectively, this research reveals that in the Yukon North Slope and Richardson Mountains, the reintroduced and expanding population of muskox i) has low encounter rates and differential habitat use with caribou and ii) has selection patterns that are quantifiable at a large and at a fine-scale
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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".