How effective have national parks in Canada been since their designation at preventing landscape fragmentation?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Landscape connectivity has become an important focus of Canada’s conservation goals. However, ongoing habitat loss and the break-up of habitat patches change a landscape’s composition and configuration, creating additional barriers for wildlife movement and reducing its connectivity. Canadian national parks are at risk of becoming fragmented from direct and indirect stressors, and of becoming islands of natural habitat that are disconnected from their surrounding ecosystems. This study measured the landscape fragmentation of 43 Canadian national parks and paired control areas at key time-steps throughout their history, including before their designation to present-day. It also studied the divergence of fragmentation levels over time between the parks and their control areas. The Effective Mesh Size metric (meff) with both the CUT and CBC procedures was used to measure fragmentation levels, alongside a Progressive-Change Before-After Control-Impact Paired Series study design. The results demonstrate that overall, park protection across the Canadian National Park System has been somewhat successful in preventing landscape fragmentation within their boundaries, in comparison to unprotected control areas. Half of the parks and control areas had a very small change in fragmentation over time. In 35% of parks, fragmentation levels increased faster than in their control areas, and in 15% of parks, fragmentation levels increased more slowly than in their control areas. Older parks with a long history of human influence on the landscape are more fragmented than their control areas, whereas parks that have been designated more recently have a greater effective mesh size than their associated control areas. The regions with the most successful parks in terms of preventing fragmentation are the Taiga and Hudson. The variety of park sizes in these regions indicates that the size of a national park does not necessarily indicate its fragmentation levels. This study provides insights into trends of landscape fragmentation over a long time-period and relates them to different Parks Canada management strategies throughout the agency’s history. The findings will help inform ecological connectivity programming and can indicate the effectiveness of Canada’s efforts to achieve its conservation goals.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".