Changes in fire regime explain the Holocene rise and fall of Abies balsamea in the coniferous forests of western Québec, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The coniferous boreal forest of northeastern North America is characterized by large and severe fire events and dominated by black spruce ( Picea mariana ), with scattered patches of balsam fir ( Abies balsamea), a species otherwise predominant in the more southern mixedwood boreal forests, characterized by smaller and less severe fire events. Because balsam fir is a late-successional species ill-adapted to fire, this study aimed at determining if the scattered balsam-fir patches found in the coniferous forest were relics of a former fire regime characterized by less frequent and/or severe conflagrations. Fire and vegetation history were assessed for a coniferous forest site through analyses of charcoal, pollen and plant macroremains preserved in lake sediments, peat and hydromorphic forest soil. Pollen and macroremains analyses show that black spruce dominated the local vegetation since deglaciation ( c. 8000 cal. yr BP). Balsam fir was abundant around the site during the warm and humid summers of the Hypsithermal (between c. 7000 and 3500 cal. yr BP), before gradually declining during the cool and dry Neoglacial, which was characterized by increased fire frequency and severity. Scattered balsam fir patches in the coniferous forest result from the fragmentation of formerly larger populations and are presently in disequilibrium with climate.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 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".