Effective management of endangered Blanding’s Turtle (Emydoidea blandingii) populations in Nova Scotia, Canada, requires consideration of threats posed by legacy gold mine contamination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Nova Scotia, Canada, Blanding’s turtle (Emydoidea blandingii) population is designated as endangered both federally and provincially. Currently, its range is confined to five disjunct sub-populations in the province’s southwestern interior. With fewer than 500 breeding adults in the wild, current recovery efforts are focused on reducing mortality risk to adult and juvenile turtles. However, little is being done to address the cumulative impacts of environmental contamination on species fitness and reproductive capacity. This paper focuses on legacy impacts of Nova Scotia’s gold mining industry within present-day Blanding’s turtle critical habitat, with a focus on mercury and arsenic contamination. To date, previous studies have not considered the impacts of legacy gold mining contaminants on Blanding’s turtle recovery and conservation. Three historical gold mining areas were identified as overlapping with Blanding’s turtle ranges (West Caledonia District, Brookfield District, and Pleasant River Barrens District). To address the current knowledge gap, site assessments for Blanding’s turtle presence, food web contamination surveys, turtle claw tissue sampling, and overall site remediation are recommended to complement existing recovery efforts. Keywords: Blanding’s turtle, critical habitat, environmental con-tamination, gold mine tailings
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".