Polar bear research: has science helped management and conservation?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Wildlife management is predicated upon the use of scientific research to assist decision-making. However, assessment of the effectiveness of the management–research relationship is rarely undertaken. Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) have benefitted from an international agreement that required each of the countries within the species’ range to manage them using the best available scientific data. The objective of this paper is to conduct a systematic review of peer-reviewed literature on polar bears to describe research trends and to assess how effectively research has met management needs. We analyzed 1191 peer-reviewed scientific papers from 1886–2016 covering 24 research topics. Annual counts of papers within each research topic were assessed for temporal trends, spatial coverage, and the extent to which they have facilitated management and monitoring needs. The annual number of papers increased from <10 in the early 1960s to >50 in recent years with a mean of 2.2 papers per subpopulation per year with great variation between the 19 global subpopulations. We conclude that there is an imbalance in the geographic and thematic focus of peer-reviewed research in recent years, and that only four subpopulations appear to have had a research focus covering most parameters essential for conservation and sound management.
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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.010 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".