Cetacean monitoring and occurrence in St. Anns Bank Marine Protected Area
Bibliographic record
Abstract
St. Anns Bank, located off the coast of Nova Scotia, was designated as a Marine Protected Area (MPA) in 2017, and is part of the distributional range and migration route of various cetacean species. However, there has been little dedicated research on cetacean presence in this area. This study presents available cetacean sighting records and the results of acoustic monitoring for baleen whales conducted by DFO Maritimes Region. Opportunistic cetacean sightings records collected between 1970 and 2023 and located within 50 nautical miles of the MPA were obtained from the DFO Maritimes Whale Sightings Database (n=2,336), and represented a diverse assemblage of cetacean species. Within the MPA boundaries, long-finned pilot whales, common dolphins, minke whales, and humpback whales were the most frequently sighted species. Passive acoustic monitoring was conducted using bottom-mounted recorders deployed at five different stations within the MPA between 2015 and 2023, resulting in 2,688 recording days. Calls from blue, fin, sei, humpback, North Atlantic right, and minke whales were identified within the recordings. Blue and fin whale calls were most prevalent at deeper recording stations located in the eastern portion of the MPA, while humpback whales were more commonly recorded at shallow stations located further west. No spatial trends in detections of sei, North Atlantic right, or minke whales were apparent. Seasonal patterns varied across species, with blue, fin, sei, and humpback whale calls present throughout the year, while minke and North Atlantic right whales were recorded primarily from July through December. These results provide new insight into the diversity of cetacean species occupying the St. Anns Bank MPA and the spatial and seasonal patterns of baleen whale occurrence in this area and can be used to inform future monitoring efforts. In particular, the establishment of consistent long-term PAM stations would enable the assessment of long-term trends in cetacean presence within the MPA.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".