Fencing Large Predator-Free and Competitor-Free Landscapes for the Recovery of Woodland Caribou in Western Alberta: An Ineffective Conservation Option
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada, boreal woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) are listed as “threatened” throughout their range due directly and indirectly to habitat loss. In western Alberta, in order to recover the Little Smoky boreal caribou population, the provincial government announced a plan to create a 100-km2-fenced enclosure that would encompass part of the caribou population range. Within the enclosure, all predators and other ungulate species will be killed. The fenced area will be dedicated entirely to the farming of caribou, with the intent of releasing weaned calves into adjacent areas with continued intensive wolf (Canis lupus) killing throughout the region. Industrial activities will be allowed to continue within the enclosure. In this review, we assess the government’s proposed program on the basis of questions related to the long-term recovery and sustainability of the caribou population, and the conservation and welfare of wildlife populations and individuals. We conclude that this program is unlikely to safeguard the future of this caribou population, will jeopardize wildlife communities inside and outside the fenced enclosure, and will cause harm to wild populations and individual animals. We recommend an alternative habitat conservation program which is ecologically justified over the long term, and invite the scientific community to object to the implementation of the government’s proposed Little Smoky caribou recovery program.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".