Constrained conservation: examining legal, policy and organizational obstacles to sage-grouse conservation and recovery in Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Though conservation and recovery requires that science identify the biological constraints and provide suggestions for mitigation, endangered species conservation and recovery is not solely a scientific enterprise. Instead conservation and recovery is a complex management task reliant on a regulatory and institutional context that provides support and integration of conservation objectives alongside alternative resource and land management decisions. This thesis seeks to explore this alternative context considering the legal, policy and organizational dimen ions of the task of conservation and recovery. Using the case study method, this thesis examined the legal, policy and organization constraints to Alberta efforts to conserve and recover the Greater Sage-grouse (Centrocerus urophasianus) in Alberta. Using key-informant interviews, observation, document analysis and literature reviews, this then is considered the coordination of development and conservation considerations within Alberta's land and resource management system. In concluding, this thesis identified specific constraints resulting from legal deficiencies in both tool availability and implementation, policy problems resulting from management ambiguity and conflicting objectives and organizational obstacles resulting from inappropriate and significant departmentalization and segregation of authority. The cumulative effects of these individual issues function to hinder the conservation task. Management recommendations are provided at the close as suggestions for overcoming these existent barriers.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".