Bridging Knowledge Gaps for Protection and Recovery: Habitat Use and Threats of Blanding’s Turtles in an Understudied Region of The Great Lakes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ontario is home to 8 species of freshwater turtles, all of which are federally at-risk of extirpation. To conserve declining populations, the government turns to recovery strategies for each species that are listed as threatened, endangered, or extirpated. These recovery strategies require previous field studies to identify critical habitats to be protected and threats that need to be mitigated. Because the majority of this information relies on field studies, there are still many knowledge gaps that need to be investigated, particularly in regions such as eastern Georgian Bay of the Laurentian Great Lakes, where little research has been done. This region contains relatively abundant populations of 6 species of freshwater turtle, including the federally endangered Blanding’s turtle (Emydoidea blandingii), which acts as an umbrella species for the conservation of other species that share its habitat. This thesis aims to fill knowledge gaps related to the critical habitat that needs to be protected in this region, as well as potential threats to Blanding’s turtles that may require mitigation efforts, such as human development or climate change. In the first chapter, we determine the habitats used by 22 Blanding’s turtles over the active, nesting, and overwintering seasons among coastal and inland wetlands. We also identify site-specific threats due to preferences for nesting near built-up areas rather than rock barrens. In the second chapter, we determine a significant loss in functional aquatic wetland habitat for Blanding’s turtles due to changes in annual water levels and infer associated impacts due to climate change. This was achieved by classifying satellite imagery between 2002 (lower water level) and 2019 (higher water level) and conducting change detection analyses. This research is the first to occur along the eastern coast of Georgian Bay and will advance our understanding of the threats and habitat requirements of freshwater turtles. The findings will be used to implement recovery strategies aimed at protecting and mitigating threats to imperiled freshwater turtles.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 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".