Ecology, Planning, and River Management in the United States: Some Historical Reflections
Bibliographic record
Abstract
River ecologists are also river-basin planners. However, their role in planning has developed slowly over the decades since the beginning of the 20th century. Three major factors explain this phenomenon. First, ecologists focused on plant and animal communities rather than on broader policy issues related to land settlement and water development. Second, the federal government, and most state and local governments as well, used mainly economic criteria to justify projects. Intangible benefits, including the value of species or an aesthetically pleasing landscape, drew relatively little attention. Third, the public generally favored development, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Only after World War II did the public's position shift in favor of more preservation, as ecologists developed the concept of the ecosystem, large dam projects forced basin inhabitants from their homes, and chemical and nuclear pollutants threatened the environment. Also, urbanization increased support for the preservation of recreation sites and of streams undisturbed by human intervention. Meanwhile, partly through important advances in geomorphology and hydrology, ecologists acquired new tools to understand the land-water relationship within river basins. Neverthless, benefit-cost analysis continued to dominate federal waterresources planning, and organizational culture and competing or overlapping bureaucracies hampered rational water resources administration. Environmental groups and physical, natural, and even social scientists began to promote alternative ways to develop rivers. Today, the ideas of integrated water resources management, sustainable development, and comprehensive river-basin management dominate much of the thinking about the future course of river planning in the United States. Any future planning must include ecologists who can help their planning colleagues choose from among rational choices that balance ecological and human demands, provide advice when planning guidance is drafted, assist engineers in designing projects that lead to ecologically responsible solutions, and help monitor results.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".