Long-term impact of fire on high-altitude balsam fir (<i>Abies balsamea</i>) forests in south-central Quebec deduced from soil charcoal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Extensive balsam fir (Abies balsamea (L.) Mill.) stands across the southern boreal forest are ecosystems likely more influenced by insect outbreaks and windthrows than by fire. To what degree the dominance of balsam fir stands reflects past and present disturbance dynamics associated with fire is not well documented. To answer this question, we focused on the reconstruction of the long-term fire history of high-altitude balsam fir forests of southern Quebec. The reconstruction was based on botanically identified and radiocarbon-dated soil charcoal particles in 19 sites covering successional stages from white birch (Betula payrifera Marsh.) to mixed white birch – balsam fir stands. Fire activity commenced early after deglaciation, about 9600 calibrated years before present when the first boreal tree species were established. Fire occurred recurrently during the following 5000 years with a forest landscape composed of the principal tree species common to the boreal forest, including jack pine (Pinus banksiana Lamb.). Fire activity ceased more or less abruptly about 4500 years ago due to less fire-conducive, more humid conditions. Then, the forest landscape progressively changed towards a larger representation of white birch – balsam fir forests and the disappearance of jack pine. Whereas several balsam fir stands have not burned over the last 4500 years, scattered fires occurred in particular over the last 250 years when 1815 and 1878 fires, probably man-made, burned 50% of the forest, thus causing a major change in the composition of the forest landscape. It is concluded that the high-altitude forest landscape of southern Quebec changed profoundly over the Holocene in close association with a time-transgressive dry-to-wet climatic gradient.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".