Beyond the Pristine: Reframing the Notion of Nature Conservation through the Agency of Plant 'Vagabonds' in Toronto's Rouge National Urban Park
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Protecting nature in its pristine state and within designated geographic boundaries is embedded within historical framings of conservation. Yet, in the context of today's rapid anthropogenic change, this concept is increasingly flawed and irrelevant. This thesis draws from interdisciplinary literature in political ecology, geography, and landscape architecture to explore Rouge National Urban Park, Toronto's newest category of urban nature preserve. It foregrounds Botanist Gilles Clément's research on "vagabonds" as valuable ruderal species with design agency. Using fieldwork, mapping, document analysis, and model making as catalysts for design intervention, the work proposes the park's transformation into a vagabond living lab, employing a network of experimental design instruments across the landscape. Each design frames the site as a testing ground for new understandings of nature conservation within urban contexts—done by exploring the role of vagabonds. Ultimately, this thesis speculates what future urban landscapes can be like in conditions of environmental flux.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".