Three centuries of annual area burned variability in northwestern North America inferred from tree rings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Annual area burned (AAB) variability in northwestern North America was inferred from 38 tree-ring width chronologies widely distributed across boreal regions and spanning the past 300 years and the minimum 1833—1998 interval. AAB estimates accounted for up to 61% of the variance in AAB observed from 1959 to 1998, and were verified using a split sample calibration-verification scheme. Spatial correlation maps of gridded temperature and precipitation data provided an indication of the reliability of the reconstruction to approximate fire-conducive climate variability beyond the period of calibration. Singular spectrum analysis and analysis of variance suggested that AAB has significantly changed during the course of the past 150 years toward increasing variance. Recent 1959—1998 decadal changes in AAB of northwestern North America fitted well within an oscillatory mode centred on 26.7 years and accounting for 21.1% of the variance in the reconstruction. As in previous studies, the current findings suggest that AAB is correlated to seasonal land/ocean temperature variability and that future warming could lead to greater AAB. However, the study has the weakness of not accounting for complex interactions between climate and ecosystem processes and thus its results should be interpreted with caution. We suggest that a calibration model conducted on multiple types of fire proxies (tree rings, charcoal data, fire scars and stand-establishment records) could be relevant for addressing these weaknesses.
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".