The fire history of a 416-year-old western larch tree in southeastern British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The fire history obtained from pre-settlement fire-scarred trees provides useful benchmarks for the restoration of dry interior, fire-dependent forest ecosystems. In the Rocky Mountain Trench of southeast British Columbia, historical benchmarks obtained from periods prior to significant European influence (i.e., pre-1850) are common reference points for forest ecosystem restoration. This extension note discusses the fire history of a 416-year-old western larch (Larix occidentalis) whose growth rings recorded 268 years of fire history before 1850. The study tree's estimated mean fire interval (MFI) is 34.1 years, and its fire intervals ranged from 19 years to 51 years. The tree did not record a fire during the last 130 years of its life. This extension note also discusses the development of a network of cross-dated benchmark sites across the landscape that would create a master fire chronology for the region. Such a chronology would reflect the natural variability of historical fire patterns, helping policy-makers, managers, recovery teams, and restoration practitioners understand the spatial and temporal distribution of landscape-scale disturbances that historically have created fire-dependent ecological communities (many of which include wildlife and plant species now at risk). The creation of a benchmark network would also refine dry interior forest restoration/conservation programs and improve their efficacy.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".