Slow growth, long-lived trees, and minimal disturbance characterize the dynamics of an ancient, montane forest in coastal British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Elucidating the factors that structure very old forests is crucial to understanding their dynamics. We reconstructed the history of an ancient (1000-year-old) stand in the mountains of coastal British Columbia that contained four tree species (Abies amabilis (Dougl.) Forbes, Chamaecyparis nootkatensis (D. Don) Spach., Tsuga mertensiana (Bong.) Carr., and Tsuga heterophylla (Raf.) Sarg.) in the canopy and the seedling bank. Using dendrochronological procedures, we examined the growth patterns of all trees (>4.0 cm diameter at breast height) in four 0.25 ha mapped plots. We also sampled the seedling bank in the four plots. Age structures indicated variable but rather continuous recruitment for all species. Periods of increased amounts of release or rapid early growth occurred but were not pronounced. Overall, we found little evidence for stand-level disturbance or the formation of large gaps. All four tree species appear able to persist in the stand in the absence of major stand-level disturbance, but the mechanisms contributing to coexistence differ. One species, C. nootkatensis, depends primarily on vegetative reproduction for persistence. Single-tree gap dynamics have predominated in the stand for centuries, placing this stand at the far end of the gradient from forests controlled by large, severe disturbances to those where very small-scale processes predominate.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".