TWO CENTURIES OF MULTIPLE HUMAN IMPACTS AND SUCCESSIVE CHANGES IN A NORTH ATLANTIC FOOD WEB
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
European colonization of North America severely altered terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems alike. Here, we integrate archaeological, historical, and recent data to derive the ecological history of the Quoddy Region, Bay of Fundy, Canada, an upwelling region rich in marine diversity and productivity. We document successive changes on all trophic levels from primary producers to top predators over the last centuries. Our objectives were to (1) construct a baseline of “what was natural in the coastal ocean,” and (2) analyze the sequence and potential interaction of multiple human impacts. Archaeological records highlight the abundance and diversity of marine species used by indigenous people over the last 2000–3000 years. Europeans colonized the area in the late 1700s and rapidly transformed the environment by multiple “top‐down” (exploitation), “bottom‐up” (nutrient loading), and “side‐in” (habitat destruction, pollution) impacts. Most large vertebrates were severely overexploited by 1900, leading to the extinction of three mammal and six bird species. Diadromous fish dramatically declined after river damming in the early 1800s, and recovery was prevented by subsequent river pollution. Overfishing of groundfish stocks started in the late 1800s, gradually leading to a final collapse in the 1970s. In the 20th century, decline of traditional fisheries induced a shift to low trophic level harvesting and aquaculture, which increased exponentially over the past 20 years. Eutrophication caused shifts in seaweed and phytoplankton communities: Some long‐lived rockweeds were replaced by annual bloom‐forming algae, and diatoms were replaced by dinoflagellates. Today, the once unique Quoddy Region shows the most common signs of degradation found in highly impacted coastal areas worldwide. Multiple human influences have altered abundance and composition of every trophic level in the food web and reduced upper trophic levels by at least one order of magnitude. We highlight cumulative and indirect effects that impair the ability to predict and manage highly impacted coastal ecosystems. On the other hand, simple protection and restoration measures in the 20th century led to the recovery of some species. It is these successes that provide guidance for a more sustainable interaction of humans with their marine environment.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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