Explanations of a Changing Landscape: A Critical Examination of the British Columbia Bark Beetle Epidemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper focuses on an unprecedented bark beetle epidemic in British Columbia, Canada. The epidemic has killed vast areas of forests, with significant impacts to ecosystems and timber-dependent communities. Explanations of this outbreak continue to overlook or underemphasize important actors and relationships. This paper offers a more detailed explanation of the actors and processes involved in the outbreak and associated responses. Political ecology was applied to guide this analysis, emphasizing both the ecological and social factors involved. Research methods entailed an extensive literature review and over seventy interviews with scientists, policy makers, land managers, and elected officials. Findings illustrate how the outbreak involved many actors, beyond bark beetles and trees, and resulted from complex interactions between ecological and social factors. This study also reveals how actors that prioritized short-term economic gains shaped the conditions that fostered the outbreak and continue to constrain responses. This study illustrates how applications of political ecology that give increased attention to ecology are necessary to fully understand the drivers of environmental change.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".