DEHCHO - GREAT RIVER: The State of Science in the Mackenzie Basin (1960-1985)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Mackenzie Basin is a unique eco-hydrological zone, a vast store of natural resources, and home to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Historically, the Basin has been the subject of political controversy, protection, exploitation, and research in the natural and social sciences. While the Basin’s future is unknown, there are real risks that records documenting past conditions in the Basin will be lost. The goal of this project was to seek out historical documents and data pertaining to the quality of water in the Mackenzie Basin between 1960 and 1985. This initiative, sponsored by The Gordon Foundation, proved to be very timely because of cuts to federal libraries that resulted in the boxing up of large numbers of federal reports and other relevant documents. UNU-INWEH sourced thousands of references from various online databases and private collections. However, hard copies of documents were much more difficult to obtain. While librarians in public libraries and universities were extremely helpful, some documents were stored in locations where access is limited. Other documents could only be ordered through interlibrary loans, which are subject to a maximum number per request and a loan period of two weeks. Thus, the time to source even a small number of documents was in the order of months. There were fortunate developments that mitigated the slow erosion of historical documents. Retiring federal scientists and university professors with personal collections were willing to donate documents in the hope that they would be put to good use and kept safe. This project sheds some light on the importance of historical documents. Trends in development can be aligned with patterns in water quality. Impacts predicted 40 years ago can be evaluated against what actually occurred. On the other hand, some calls for action appear to have gone unheeded. For instance, proposals to develop monitoring programs in the Basin are still being heard more than 40 years after these data gaps were originally recognized. UNU-INWEH feels fortunate to have been involved in this project and to have had an opportunity to evaluate documentation that may have been otherwise lost.
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 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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".