SOURCES: developing indicators and understanding environmental impacts in the oils sands region
Bibliographic record
Abstract
All research activities of SOURCES relate to developing new methodologies to allow distinguishing contaminants that are naturally released to water and terrestrial ecosystems from those produced by oil sands (OS) extraction activities. Main objectives: (1) assessing how new indicators and approaches for waterborne and airborne contaminants can help identify OS extraction-related changes to the natural regimes; and (2) understanding processes controlling the distribution of contaminants in the broad region of the OS open-mining developments. Waterborne Contamination The current research is a direct follow up of NRCan previous test study (OF 7195) as there is a need to specifically continue characterizing the various natural sources of contaminants (numerous lithostratigraphic units and groundwater systems); better constrain the anthropogenic signals of the contaminants, and identify, quantify and model the flux of OS-related chemicals into the groundwater near open-mining OS extraction activities, at the regional scale. Metals - This activity explores lithium (delta-7Li) isotopes of groundwater as an indicator to strengthen the discrimination between natural and OS-derived contaminants, and the chemistry and reactive transport of metals to understand their distribution and fate. AEOs - This study specifically evaluates the potential of hydrogen (delta-2H), and stable (delta-13C) and radioactive (delta-14C) carbon isotopes for characterizing Acid Extractible Organics (AEOs), and investigates the biogeochemical processes controlling their distribution in groundwater. Airborne Contamination Forest N Cycle - This research involves characterizing airborne nitrogen (N) contaminants in air wet and dry samples from outside the OS region using new isotopic methods (on-line simultaneous delta-15N, delta-18O and delta-17O values); to distinguish their ranges from OS air results. It further investigates the possible impacts of these airborne N contaminants on processes controlling the long-term tree-ring delta-15N trends, by determining delta-15N values in the complete suite of the soil-fungi-root-stem-leave continuum. This research also addresses the question as to how the nutritive regimes of pine and spruce stands and the forest N cycle are modified by OS operations (coll. with ECCC, CFS-Q, CFS-Ed). PAHs -The key issue here is quantifying natural polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) related to forest fires and bitumen-containing rocks from anthropogenic sources. Naturally present in bitumen, PAHs are also released into the environment through the incomplete combustion of organic matter, whether from modern biomass or fossil fuels, and via diagenetic processes. The current activities focus on applying compound specific delta-13C, delta-2H and radiocarbon analysis (14C) to sediment cores and snow of lakes in the OS region in which PAHs from forest fires can perhaps be distinguished from those that are OS mining-related and hence contain no detectable 14C.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 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".