Projecting regions of North Atlantic right whale, <i>Eubalaena glacialis</i>, habitat suitability in the Gulf of Maine for the year 2050
Bibliographic record
Abstract
North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) are critically endangered, and recent changes in distribution patterns have been a major management challenge. Understanding the role that environmental conditions play in habitat suitability helps to determine the regions in need of monitoring or protection for conservation of the species, particularly as climate change shifts suitable habitat. This study used three species distribution modeling algorithms, together with historical whale abundance data (1993–2009) and environmental covariate data, to build monthly ensemble models of past E. glacialis habitat suitability in the Gulf of Maine. The model was projected onto the year 2050 for a range of climate scenarios. Specifically, the distribution of the species was modeled using generalized additive models, boosted regression trees, and artificial neural networks, with environmental covariates that included sea surface temperature, bottom water temperature, bathymetry, a modeled Calanus finmarchicus habitat index, and chlorophyll. Year-2050 projections used downscaled climate anomaly fields from Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5 and 8.5. The relative contribution of each covariate changed seasonally, with an increase in the importance of bottom temperature and C. finmarchicus in the summer, when model performance was highest. A negative correlation was observed between model performance and sea surface temperature contribution. The 2050 projections indicated decreased habitat suitability across the Gulf of Maine in the period from July through October, with the exception of narrow bands along the Scotian Shelf. The results suggest that regions outside of the current areas of conservation focus may become increasingly important habitats for E. glacialis under future climate scenarios.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".