Development and Validation of an Ecosystem Sustainability Indicator for Metropolitan Areas: A Case Study
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article addresses energy systems from an ecological perspective with a particular emphasis on landscapes. As a measure of ecosystem sustainability an indicator is developed and tested to gauge the extent of change in three components of landscapes: land cover class, road length, and population count. Other components covering aspects of air, water, and soil will be added in the future. Mimicking the concept of “potential energy” in energy systems, the indicator developed in this study is a proxy for the “potential capacity” of landscapes. That is, the potential capacity of landscapes in provisioning ecosystem goods and services. The indicator is designed with a particular emphasis on metropolitan areas. The metropolitan area of Montréal, Canada, is selected as the case study. The indicator is based on processing binary signals, a nonparametric approach toward a composite indicator, where each signal represents either a change or no change in one or more components and elements of the landscape. In this case study, changes between 2001 and 2011 are examined. The potential capacity of landscapes in 2001 is used as the baseline. Macro‐ and microscale measures are assigned to landscapes from different sources of data including satellite‐interpreted land cover data and two census‐based administrative records, the road network and population data. The addition of road network and population data adds to the intensities of signals that may have been underestimated by the satellite‐based land cover data alone. Estimates are wholly and partly validated using higher resolution land cover data and images for ground truthing. Results indicate that between 2001 and 2011 landscapes within a 25‐km diameter encircling the metropolitan area of Montréal have been experiencing different levels of depletions in their potential capacities. An upper limit estimate generated by the methodology applied suggests that the potential ecological capacity of landscapes in the study area has been depleting at a rate of 22 km 2 per year. The estimates presented are considered proof‐of‐concept and are not intended for use as official statistics.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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 it