Mapping vessel traffic patterns in the ice-covered waters of the Pacific Arctic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Recent climate change has caused declines in ice coverage which have lengthened the open water season in the Arctic and increased access to resources and shipping routes. These changes have resulted in more vessel activity in seasonally ice-covered regions. While traffic is increasing in the ice-free season, the amount of vessel activity in the marginal ice zone (ice concentration 15–80%) or in pack ice (>80% concentration) remains unclear. Understanding patterns of vessel activities in ice is important given increased safety challenges and environmental impacts. Here, we couple high-resolution ship tracking information with sea ice thickness and concentration data to quantify vessel activity in ice-covered areas of the Pacific Arctic (northern Bering, Chukchi, and western Beaufort Seas). This region is a geo-strategically critical area that contains globally important commercial fisheries and serves as a corridor for Arctic access for wildlife and vessels. We find that vessel traffic in the marginal ice zone is widely distributed across the study area while vessel traffic in pack ice is concentrated along known shipping routes and in areas of natural resource development. Of the statistically significant relationships between vessel traffic and both sea ice concentration and thickness, over 99% are negative, indicating that increasing sea ice is associated with decreasing vessel traffic on a monthly time scale. Furthermore, there is substantial vessel traffic in areas of high concentration for bowhead whales ( Balaena mysticetus ), and traffic in these areas increased four-fold during the study period. Fishing vessels dominate vessel traffic at low ice concentrations, but vessels categorized as Other, likely icebreakers, are the most common vessel type in pack ice. These findings indicate that vessel traffic in areas of ice coverage is influenced by distant policy and resource development decisions which should be taken into consideration when trying to predict future vessel-ice interactions in a changing climate.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".