What makes a wetland significant? An examination of changes made to the Ontario Wetland Evaluation System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Wetland ecosystems are declining globally, including in Ontario. To preserve certain wetlands from human disturbances, Ontario uses the Ontario Wetland Evaluation System (OWES) to evaluate wetlands and determine whether they are ‘provincially significant’. Wetlands that are determined to be ‘provincially significant’ are protected from development by section 2.1 of the Provincial Policy Statement. In 2022, the Ontario government introduced updates to OWES that change how wetlands are evaluated. This report examined these changes and analyzed their implications for land use planning. Through literature reivew, policy analysis, and semi-structured interviews conducted with practicing evaluators, it was found that the changes to OWES are likely to result in less wetlands being protected from development. Based on the findings, this report recommends that planning authorities review their local policies affecting wetlands and assess whether these policies are still suitable.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".