Early Mississippian lycopsid forests in a delta-plain setting at Norton, near Sussex, New Brunswick, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mississippian lycopsid forests in growth position are extremely rare, and their community-scale ecology remains enigmatic. This is a significant gap in our knowledge, not least because they represent the precursors of Pennsylvanian ‘Coal Forests’. In this paper, nearly 700 in situ fossil trees are described from 13 entisol or inceptisol horizons in the mid-Tournaisian Albert Formation (Horton Group) at Norton, near Sussex, New Brunswick, Canada. These trees, almost all of which are lycopsids of the Protostigmaria – Lepidodendropsis -type, are rooted mostly in the flood-disturbed interdistributary wetland deposits of prograding wave-dominated deltas. Tree mapping on extensive palaeosol surfaces indicates the existence of extremely dense forest vegetation. Scaled up to standard forestry units, densities of 10 000–30 000 trees per hectare are inferred. A significant inverse linear relationship between tree diameter and density for the five most extensive palaeosols indicates that inter-tree competition led to natural self-thinning as the forests matured. Forest maturation also led to a reduction in tree-spacing heterogeneity. Flood events regularly killed whole stands at Norton, burying trees in sandstone sheets, and preventing establishment of climax vegetation. Charcoal remains demonstrate that wildfire was another important disturbance process.
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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".