In Defense of Soil: an Ontario Greenbelt Regeneration Strategy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ontario’s prime agricultural soils are in distress. Degraded by decades of intense conventional agricultural practices and threatened by the advancing footprint of suburban development, the once abundant layer of topsoil has been abused and exploited to produce ever-higher yields of commodity crops intended for export overseas instead of for consumption by Ontario communities. As legislation lacks requirements for sustainable farming practices on government-owned lands, farmers use harmful agriculture practices to yield the most results during their lease. Located within the Ontario Greenbelt, the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve is an agricultural land area owned by the provincial government where farmers do exactly that. In Defense of Soil asks: how could the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve support a repository of exemplary regenerative agricultural knowledge that is specific to Ontario’s agricultural landscape, which orients the products of Ontario’s farms towards local markets instead of global exports? This thesis realizes Ontario’s only designated agricultural preserve has the potential to become a landscape mosaic of healthy, diverse, and aggrading ecosystems that provide energy and life to surrounding communities. \nThis thesis seeks to explore a series of landscape transformations that increase crop production in combination with practices that restore natural ecosystems. The regenerative strategies used in the design of the agricultural preserve aim to evoke a sense of place which challenges conventional notions of today’s degraded rural landscapes—a place which upholds nourishing, ecological, and human-scale farming techniques. \nThrough drawings, illustrations, maps, and data visualization, this thesis will propose a design for the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve to demonstrate the key regenerative impacts this work could have on the landscape above, the communities nearby, and the soil below. Working to address the needs of both the community and the environment, this vision for the Duffins Rouge Agricultural Preserve exemplifies regenerative agriculture practices for Ontario, advocating for the land itself and we who rely on it.
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 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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.016 | 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) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
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.
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".