Aridity on the Canadian Plains
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Prairie Ecozone is the only major region of Canada where drought is a landscape hazard; aridity is linked to soil erosion. Management of prairie ecosystems and soil landscapes therefore requires an understanding of past and future trends and variability in regional aridity. We used instrumental and paleoclimatic records to define a regional baseline for prairie aridity, to evaluate the utility of modern climate normals (i.e.1961-1990) as a benchmark for future climatic change, and to provide a historical context for a range of General Circulation Model (GCM) forecasts of regional aridity. A warm-dry scenario derived from the Canadian GCM projects a significant increase in the area of subhumid and semiarid climate. Tree rings and diatom-inferred lake salinity record prolonged arid events and show that the climate normal period of 1961-1990 may have been the most benign climate of the past 750 years. The climate of the 20thcentury was anomalous in terms of the absence of sustained drought. Because both lake and tree-ring analyses recorded an abrupt amelioration of climatic conditions near the start of the instrumental record, we suggest that the immediate impacts of future global warming may be to return the prairies to past conditions in which persistent aridity was recorded for intervals of decades or longer.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".