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Paleo-data is policy relevant: How do we better incorporate it in policy and decision making?

2025· article· en· W4406518481 on OpenAlexaff
Kathryn Allen, Chris Gouramanis, David Sauchyn

Bibliographic record

VenueGlobal and Planetary Change · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEarth and Planetary Sciences
TopicGeology and Paleoclimatology Research
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Regina
FundersAustralian Research Council
KeywordsComputer sciencePolicy makingData sciencePolitical sciencePublic administration

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The relatively recent acceleration of human activities that adversely impact Earth's systems has led to an increasingly urgent impetus to understand, mitigate, and adapt to these impacts. However, comprehension of natural systems, and fluctuations in their state, requires long-term data to capture the magnitude and direction of changes in these systems over very long time frames (decades to millennia). The current reliance on short instrumental or monitoring time series, that span only the last century or less, is simply inadequate to sustainably manage natural systems. Despite this growing need for long-term information and the abundance of paleo-data available, there has been little effort or success in incorporating paleo-science into policy and decision making. We use examples to demonstrate how paleo-data provides important insights into problems from three different domains: forest management and restoration, water resource management and wetland ecosystem management. We discuss a process through which opportunities to better utilise paleo-data by policy decision makers to achieve better policy outcomes can be identified. This involves first acknowledging the very different characteristics of paleo-scientists and policy makers, followed by recognition of the constraints, or barriers to the uptake of paleo-science information. These barriers exist as much for scientists as for policy makers. Identification of barriers enables opportunities for enhanced collaboration to improve the use of paleo-data for policy and decision making to be identified. Fundamentally, much greater interaction between paleo-scientists and policy makers is required to promote better science translation, data availability as well as to promote scientific literacy in government and industry, and policy literacy in the paleo-science community. Processes such as co-design are one way to achieve these aims, but require adequate resourcing, time and the collective will to collaborate. • Paleo-data provides a range of insights into long-term environmental change. • We identify barriers & opportunities to better assimilate paleo-insights into policy. • Communication between policy practitioners and paleo-scientists is a key challenge.

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 distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.106
Threshold uncertainty score0.949

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.049
GPT teacher head0.304
Teacher spread0.256 · 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 teacher head, not a consensus.

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

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

Citations7
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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