Areas Important for Ecological Connectivity Throughout Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Governments around the world have acknowledged the importance of conserving ecological connectivity to help reverse the decline of biodiversity. In this study we employed recent methodological developments in circuit theory to conduct the first pan-Canadian analysis of multi-species connectivity for all terrestrial regions of the country, at a spatial grain sufficient to support local land-management decisions. We developed a movement cost surface with a limited number of thematic categories using the most recently updated land cover data available for the country. We divided the country into 17 tiles and used a wall-to-wall, omnidirectional mode of Circuitscape on each tile in order to assess ecological connectivity throughout entire landscapes as opposed to strictly among protected areas. The resulting raw current density map of Canada revealed heterogenous patterns of current density across the country, strongly influenced by geography, natural barriers, and human development. We included a validation analysis of the output current density map with independent wildlife data from across the country and found that mammal and herpetofauna locations were predicted by areas of high current density. We believe our current density map can be used to identify areas important for connectivity throughout Canada and thereby contribute to efforts to conserve biodiversity.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".