Authorized net losses of fish habitat demonstrate need for improved habitat protection in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fish habitat is essential to the stability and productivity of fisheries. In Canada, the primary legal tool for protecting fish habitat is the federal Fisheries Act. In 2012, this law was changed to narrow the scope of habitat protection. The government’s position was that the previous regime went beyond what was necessary to protect fish and fish habitat. Here, we tested that assertion by examining Fisheries Act authorizations to harmfully alter, disrupt, or destroy fish habitat issued by Fisheries and Oceans Canada during a 6-month period in 2012, obtained using access to information processes. We found the majority of projects (67%) were authorized to impact more habitat than proponents were required to compensate for, likely resulting in a net loss of fish habitat. Our analysis show an aggregate net loss — defined as authorized impact minus required compensation — of 2 919 143 m2 authorized across 78 projects. Drawing from these results, we present four recommendations for an improved habitat protection regime under a renewed Fisheries Act, emphasizing the need to establish a public registry for authorizations and monitoring data.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".