Forest Fires and Old-Growth Forest Abundance in Wet, Cold, Engelmann Spruce – Subalpine Fir Forests of British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The amounts of old-growth forest present under current and pre-harvesting era disturbance regimes in the dominant higher elevation (900–2300 m) forests in eastern British Columbia (B.C.) – wet cold Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii Parry ex Engelm.) - subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa (Hook.) Nutt.) forests (ESSFwc), and one important group of ESSFwc forests, the Northern Monashee (ESSFwc2) biogeoclimatic variant – were quantified using a GIS forest age database, with the assumption that oldgrowth forests were forests >140 years old. This was done in order to inform natural disturbance based management in this part of British Columbia. Database constraints restricted the analysis to the post 1800 period only and resulted in estimation of a range of old growth for any time period. The oldest trees in old-growth forests do not necessarily indicate when the forests were last disturbed by fire, as 14C dating of charcoal indicated that, for two of five 210- to 320-year old stands sampled, the most recent fire event probably occurred over 1000 years ago. The amount of old growth in both ESSFwc and ESSFwc2 forests, since 1800, decreased to a minimum in the mid to late 1800s, then increased. In the case of the ESSFwc2, this increase occurred until the 1960s before the amount of old growth decreased again. Amounts of old growth in 2003 (58–59% of the forested area) were within the pre-harvesting era range of 30–60% in ESSFwc2 forests, but may be above the range of 20–50% in ESSFwc forests. Old-growth forests have dominated most subalpine landscapes in eastern B.C. for at least the last several decades. If management of ESSFwc forests is to emulate historical disturbance regimes, greater protection of old-growth ESSFwc forests than at present will be necessary.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".