Snow‐tracking and GIS: using multiple species‐environment models to determine optimal wildlife crossing sites and evaluate highway mitigation plans on the Trans‐Canada Highway
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Snow‐tracking data were collected for cougars ( Felis concolor), lynx ( Lynx canadensis), martens (Martes americana) and wolves (Canis lupus) and combined with remotely sensed imagery in a geographic information system (GIS) to identify wildlife crossing sites on the Trans‐Canada Highway in Banff National Park, Alberta. We used logistic regression to assess the dependent (species presence/absence) relative to measures of topography and vegetation. The exponent form of each logistic regression equation was used to predict crossing sites in a GIS, which were then contrasted with mitigation sites proposed by Parks Canada. We found that: (1) cougars were influenced positively by normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI); negatively by northness and distance to ruggedness, (2) lynx were influenced positively by wetness, greenness, rugged terrain, eastness and distance to rugged terrain; negatively by slope, (3) martens were related positively to wetness, elevation, eastness, and distance to rugged terrain; negatively to northness, (4) wolves were influenced positively by distance to ruggedness; negatively by brightness, elevation, eastness and terrain ruggedness. There were few sympatric crossing sites for all species, supporting the use of species‐specific mitigation or wide structures that capture multiple species needs. Inconsistencies were observed between the crossing sites predicted in this study and the Parks Canada proposal. The usefulness of GIS and track data to enhance mitigation projects is illustrated.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".