Stories from the benthos: decolonizing ecological baselines for understanding social-ecological resilience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The people of Nunatsiavut and the Government of Canada have a modern-day treaty that recognizes Labrador Inuit sovereignty on their land and throughout their coastal waters. Together, the Nunatsiavut and Canadian governments outlined the most important research priorities for Nunatsiavut's marine space, which includes setting ecological baselines of the benthos and better understanding Inuit use of benthic resources. This study responds to that priority to understand the social, cultural, and ecological roles benthic species play throughout Nunatsiavut using methodologies that align with Inuit cosmology and concepts of relationality. In doing so, this work attempts to decolonize the process of establishing ecological baselines in Indigenous territories. By conducting semi-structured interviews and adapting network analysis, we show how benthic species are related to each other through the lens of Labrador Inuit knowledge and experience. Labrador Inuit speak of the relationships between the benthos and fish, marine mammals, birds, and terrestrial plants—diminishing the arbitrary boundaries between land and sea to better reflect Inuit worldview. Results also demonstrate how benthic species are integrated into activities such as commercial and subsistence fishing, hunting, play, research, gardening, crafting, ceremony, medicine, and sled dog care. By establishing baselines in this decolonized manner, they contribute to understanding the profound social-ecological effects of climate change that go well beyond the direct and indirect results of changes in species presence, absence, and abundance. Most importantly, however, is the understanding of the complexity of benthic relationships for Labrador Inuit, which supports resilience in the face of climatic change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".