Microhabitat associations of lichens, feathermosses, and vascular plants in a caribou winter range, and their implications for understory development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Vegetation–environment relationships are well understood for boreal lichen woodlands, but the mechanistic basis for small-scale understory patchiness (patches dominated by lichen, mosses, and vascular plants), and its implications for the prevalence of niche vs. neutral processes driving understory development, have not been explored. We asked whether predictable vegetation–environment associations exist at the microsite scale, with the goal of informing caribou range management. We sampled canopy and edaphic variables in patches of lichen, feathermoss, and vascular plants in subalpine lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta var. latifolia Engelm. ex S.Wats.) forests, in north-central British Columbia, Canada. Lichens positively associate with microsites that have high light and heat, and low moisture and nutrient availability; vascular plants positively associate with base-cation availability, sulphur and phosphorus availability, fine-textured soils, thick organic layers, and high light; feathermosses positively associate with low light and heat, and nitrogen availability. Understory composition is most strongly associated with canopy characteristics, but is also related to edaphic properties in predictable ways; soil and canopy attributes may further interact to define distinct intra-stand niches. The viability of caribou winter ranges can likely be extended by partially thinning or burning the canopy and organic layers, but the longevity of a lichen-dominant stage may ultimately depend on the soil texture, due to its influence on vascular plant growth.
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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".