The Rise of Vancouver and the Collapse of Forage Fish: A Story of Urbanization and the Destruction of an Aquatic Ecosystem on the Salish Sea (1885–1920 CE)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Since its establishment as a Euro-Canadian settlement in the mid-nineteenth century, the marine ecology surrounding Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada, has been negatively impacted by urban development, habitat destruction, poor fisheries practices, and pollution. Focussing on forage fish – herring, smelt, and eulachon – we present the results of an extensive meta-analysis including an archaeological, ethnohistoric, and scientific/regulatory literature review of Indigenous and commercial fisheries’ harvesting records to track the early historic collapse of these fisheries from about 1885–1920 CE. We identify significant reductions in the major forage fish fisheries around Vancouver within decades of the initial Euro-Canadian settlement. These severe negative effects occurred long before scientific description of local ecosystems had begun, and the magnitude of these effects went generally unrecognized and/or are poorly understood. We argue that this is a case of the shifting baseline syndrome (SBS): each generation of researchers mistakenly assumes that modern ecological conditions they encounter approximate their natural pre-contact state.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".