Spring distribution of ringed seals (<i>Pusa hispida</i>) in Eclipse Sound and Milne Inlet, Nunavut: implications for potential ice-breaking activities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Resource development in Arctic waters is proceeding rapidly leading to increased interactions with Arctic wildlife. As sea ice extent decreases, the demand for shipping and ice-breaking operations will expand into winter and spring with greater impact on ice-dependent pinnipeds. However, knowledge of the distribution of these species, such as ringed seals (Pusa hispida (Schreber, 1775)), during spring within areas of resource development is lacking. Baffinland Iron Mines Corporation’s Mary River iron ore port in southern Milne Inlet, Nunavut opened in 2015 with proposed ice-breaking activities in spring — an important period in ringed seal seasonal life-history. We conducted infrared and photographic aerial surveys in June 2016 and 2017 to overlay the proposed ice-breaking route with ringed seal hotspots (i.e., areas of higher density). We identified four areas of overlap where proposed ice-breaking would traverse through ringed seal hotspots: eastern and western Eclipse Sound (a ringed seal pupping ground identified by local knowledge), the middle of Milne Inlet, and southern Milne Inlet. We identified potential negative implications of spring ice-breaking operations on ringed seals such as displacement, separation of mothers and pups, destruction of resting and birth lairs, and vessel–seal collisions. Results are relevant to policy decision-makers who can develop mitigation strategies in the rapidly melting and developing Arctic.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".