Influence of Aboveground Pipeline and Associated Factors on Movement of Winter-Active Boreal Mammals in the Alberta In-Situ Oil Sands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aboveground pipelines (AGP) associated with in-situ oil sands may restrict mammal movement, potentially increasing extinction probability and decreasing reproductive success. Our 12-year study used winter track count techniques to assess the response of winter-active mammals to AGP in northern Alberta, Canada. The primary questions were: which species were most prone to movement obstruction by AGP, facilities or natural factor(s)?; and which factor exerted the strongest influence on crossing likelihood? A total of 2,068 trails of 12 different species were observed. All species crossed more than half of the time. Focal species crossed on average 80% of the time. Crossing likelihood of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), ermine (Mustela erminea), coyote (Canis latrans), lynx (Lynx canadensis), and fisher (Martes pennanti) were significantly influenced by predictors including pipeline height, pipeline corridor width, infrastructure age, vegetation type, and proximity to infrastructure. Deer and lynx crossing likelihood was positively affected by pipe height. Deer, coyote, and ermine crossing likelihood was positively affected by age of pipe. Fisher and deer crossing likelihood was negatively affected by pipeline corridor widths. Our investigations show that most species cross AGP with high crossing frequencies of pipe heights, ranging from 130 cm to 160 cm. These findings are important for impact mitigation because of the scarcity of published studies of wildlife movement responses to AGP, our inclusion of small and mid-sized carnivores, and our investigation of multiple factors. We highlight mitigation and design improvements, effects of pipeline corridor widths, and challenges posed by coupling infrastructure with pipelines, serving to reduce movement barriers and fragmentation.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".