Recent Harp and Hooded Seal Pup Production Estimates in the Greenland Sea Suggest Ecology-Driven Declines
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pup production of the Greenland Sea populations of harp (Pagophilus groenlandicus) and hooded (Cystophora cristata) seals were estimated based upon aerial surveys in March 2018. One fixed-wing aircraft was used for large-area reconnaissance flights to identify the whelping concentrations and to carry out photographic surveys along systematic transects over the whelping areas. A helicopter, operated from an ice-going vessel, flew more localised reconnaissance flights, deployed GPS beacons within the detected whelping concentrations to monitor ice movements, and determined the proportion of pups in specific age-related developmental stages. While the entire estimated pupping region should ideally be covered during one day, photographic surveys in 2018 were carried out on two consecutive days, March 27 and 28, with slightly different survey designs between the two days to account for potential gaps in coverage caused by changes in visibility and cloud cover. Surveys on the two days were partially overlapping, and pup production estimates were consistent when using different combinations of transects from the two days, suggesting that these photographic counts give a relatively robust estimate of pup production in 2018. The combination of surveys that was deemed most appropriate (in terms of maximum coverage with minimum risk of double coverage) yielded an estimated harp seal pup production of 54,181 (SE=9,236, CV=0.17), which is significantly lower than estimates obtained in similar surveys in 2002, 2007, and 2012. Estimated hooded seal pup production was 12,977 (SE=1,823, CV=0.14), which is lower than estimates obtained from surveys in 2005 and 2007, but similar to estimates from the most recent survey in 2012. The reasons for these declines are unknown, but similar declines in the Barents Sea and White Sea harp seals in the mid-2000s suggest that large-scale environmental or ecological changes affecting the Barents Sea and the Norwegian Sea may be important factors.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".