Indigenous peoples as sentinels of change in human‐wildlife relationships: Conservation status of mountain goats in Kitasoo Xai'xais territory and beyond
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Local people can act as sentinels for change, especially for wildlife populations not monitored by centralized governments. Responding to concern expressed by the Kitasoo Xai'xais (KX) First Nation over a decline in mountain goat ( Oreamnos americanus ) sightings, our community‐academic partnership assessed the conservation status of goats in KX territory and beyond in British Columbia by evaluating three independent information sources. Aerial surveys (2019 and 2020) over 542 km 2 revealed a low‐density population (mean 0.25, SD 0.12 goats/km 2 ), typical of peripheral coastal range. Interviews with KX Knowledge Holders revealed that sightings from sea level have declined sharply over 40 years, a period during which temperatures have increased and snowpack has decreased. Finally, Kill data (1980–2018) showed that kills/hunter/day initially increased among guided hunters before plateauing, but declined among resident hunters (~70% of hunt days) in both coastal and interior BC. Convergent patterns among datasets suggest that coastal goats declined in abundance and/or reduced use of low‐elevation habitat, disrupting a millennia‐old relationship between KX people and goats, thereby posing a conservation concern. Broadly, our work shows that detecting threats to peripheral populations, and wildlife in general, can be informed and empowered by the knowledge of place‐based peoples and associated decentralized management. Kitasoo Xai'xais First Nation mountain goat research illustrates roles of Indigenous peoples as sentinels of population and ecosystem change.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 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 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".