MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4395984447 · doi:10.15468/jyp4fg

Historical distribution of whales shown by logbook records 1785-1913

2021· dataset· en· W4395984447 on OpenAlexaff
Gillian Woolmer

Bibliographic record

VenueGlobal Biodiversity Information Facility · 2021
Typedataset
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicMarine animal studies overview
Canadian institutionsWildlife Conservation Society CanadaWave Control Systems (Canada)
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLogbookDistribution (mathematics)GeographyHistoryArchaeologyFisheryMathematicsBiology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Original provider: Wildlife Conservation Society Dataset credits: Wildlife Conservation Society Abstract: The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has digitally captured the Townsend Whaling Charts that were published as a series of 4 charts with the article titled "The distribution of certain whales as shown by logbook records of American whale ships" by Charles Haskins Townsend in the journal Zoologica in 1935. The 4 charts show the locations of over 50,000 captures of 4 whale species; sperm whales (36,908), right whales (8,415), humpback whales (2,883) and bowhead whales (5,114). Capture locations were transcribed from North American (“Yankee”) pelagic whale vessel log books dating from 1761 to 1920 and plotted onto nautical charts in a Mercator projection by a cartographer. Each point plotted on the charts represents the location of a whaling ship on a day when one or more whales were taken and is symbolized by month of the year using a combination of color and open and closed circles. Townsend and his cartographer plotted vessel locations as accurately as possible according to log book records. When plotting locations on an earlier sperm whale chart published in 1931 the cartographer spaced points where locations were very dense, "extending areas slightly" for a number of whaling grounds. However, for charts in preparation at this time, Townsend states that "this difficulty is avoided by omitting some of the data, rather than extend the ground beyond actual whaling limits." We assumed that this statement refers to the 1935 charts but there is still some question as to whether the cartographer did in fact space locations and thus expand whaling grounds.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Dataset · Consensus signal: Dataset
Teacher disagreement score0.162
Threshold uncertainty score0.322

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0080.018
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0690.049

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.

Opus teacher head0.014
GPT teacher head0.200
Teacher spread0.186 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreDataset

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".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2021
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueGlobal Biodiversity Information FacilitySame topicMarine animal studies overviewFrench-language works237,207