Gimmie Shelter: Tree Planting in Rural Saskatchewan, 1870-1914
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tree-planting in rural Saskatchewan emerged long before the Depression and dust storm-induced shelterbelt explosion of the 1930s. Government scientists, amateur scientists, as well as forestry and agricultural experts first envisioned growing trees in the prairies soon after Canada acquired the western interior in 1870. They imagined the creation of entire forests — large woodlands covering about one-third of the land — that would transform the seemingly deficient grasslands into a fertile garden ideal for agricultural production by provoking rainfall, reducing evaporation, moderating temperatures, and creating fuel and construction material. Prairie forestry was deemed necessary to not only support agricultural development in the West, but also help ensure that Canada's timber supply would never disappear. In 1886, the Canadian government, deeply committed to western settlement and fearful that the prairie environment was preventing it, created the Dominion Experimental Farms — a system of research stations that were expected to stimulate extensive tree-planting and hopefully bring about positive environmental change in the prairies. With the backing of government forestry programs, farmers began to grow trees in Saskatchewan in the 1880s. Although there were easily twelve million planted trees on Saskatchewan farms by 1914, settlers were not generating forests. Instead, they were concerned simply about sheltering their farms. After 1886, attention shifted from forest creation to the planting of rows of trees, called shelterbelts, to protect crops, gardens, livestock, and buildings from wind, sun, and storm. Between 1870 and 1914, prairie forestry appeared originally as a massive project of environmental engineering, but evolved into an activity that would be more familiar to current inhabitants of Saskatchewan, namely the planting of shelterbelts that dot the landscape and accentuate the geographic grid of fields which has been imposed upon the land.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 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".