Range Extension of Bull Trout, <i>Salvelinus confluentus</i>, to the Central Northwest Territories, with Notes on Identification and Distribution of Dolly Varden, <i>Salvelinus malma</i>, in the Western Canadian Arctic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The presence of bull trout (Salvelinus confluentus) is reported from four locations in the Sahtu Settlement Area of the Northwest Territories centered about 64°30'N and 125°00'W. These reports extend the geographical range of this species approximately 500 km north of the previous northernmost published localities in the southern Northwest Territories (~61°N, 125°W, Prairie Creek, Liard River drainage). The identity of these char is confirmed using quantitative criteria in a linear discriminant function from the literature shown to be 100% effective in distinguishing bull trout from Dolly Varden (S. malma). Regular captures of these fish at one location over several years indicate that these records likely represent established populations and not extralimital occurrences. We hypothesize that bull trout are more extensively distributed in high-gradient streams and rivers of the south-central Mackenzie River valley and likely also occur north of this area. Only limited scientific work has been done in the area, and data on taxonomy and distributions of species are generally lacking. In much of the previous literature, reports of char (other than lake trout, S. namaycush) have identified the fish as Dolly Varden or arctic char (S. alpinus). These identifications are suspect, and care must be taken when interpreting such literature. The presence and vulnerability of bull trout present significant challenges for their conservation and management in this area.
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 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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 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".