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Mapping winter road connections to remote First Nations communities in Canada

2025· article· en· W4411540695 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Annette Salles, Donal Mullan, Matteo Spagnolo, Gemma Catney

Bibliographic record

VenueCold Regions Science and Technology · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEarth and Planetary Sciences
TopicClimate change and permafrost
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersNatural Environment Research CouncilUK Research and Innovation
KeywordsGeographyRemote sensing

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Winter roads are seasonally constructed transport routes over frozen land, lakes and rivers, allowing heavy and voluminous goods to reach remote Canadian First Nations communities in a practical and relatively affordable way. As climate change in sub-Arctic regions leads to the most pronounced temperature increases in winter, it results in shorter operating seasons and threatens essential supply and access routes. Different systems of funding and documenting this infrastructure have left an inconsistent federal record of varying temporal and spatial accuracy. Here, we have assembled a dataset that presents verified winter roads to First Nations communities for the 2022–23 season, categorised by surface type land, river ice, and lake ice. Newly constructed all-season roads and previously undocumented local roads are included, as are ice crossings connecting permanent highways. Current location and distance information can thus be derived from this easily updated dataset and used as a base for further analysis and infrastructure planning as part of a strategy to supply and connect remote First Nations.

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: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.017
Threshold uncertainty score0.122

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0030.008
Science and technology studies0.0020.001
Scholarly communication0.0020.000
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.001

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 head0.029
GPT teacher head0.235
Teacher spread0.206 · 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
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

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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