Evidence for the widespread occurrence of ancient forests on cliffs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Aim The objective of this work was to determine if the existence of ancient forests on cliffs was specific to the Niagara Escarpment, Canada, or part of a globally widespread pattern. Location Sixty‐five cliff sites were visited in five countries in the temperate climatic zone, and trees were sampled for age and growth rate on forty‐six of these. Methods Two hundred and twenty‐four core samples or cross‐sections were taken from trees on cliffs that varied in height, aspect, rock‐type, and exposure. General observations were also made of regeneration of the tree species forming the mature canopy, and other habitat conditions. Results The evidence shows that ancient slow‐growing forest occurs on most cliffs. Age and growth rate distributions were similar at all treed sites. Small‐statured Thuja, Juniperus , or Taxus stems with age estimates in excess of 1000 years were found in the United States, the United Kingdom and France, and small Pinus and Quercus stems nearly 400 years in Germany. There was a high rate of recurrence of plants in the genera Polypodium , Asplenium , Cystopteris , Campanula , Rosa , Prunus , Hedera , and Sorbus . Most of the sites appear to be habitats of completely natural origin. Conclusions We conclude that ancient natural forest is a normal feature of cliffs, at least in the temperate zone.
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) | 0.000 | 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".