Origin of the lichen woodland at its southern range limit in eastern Canada: the catastrophic impact of insect defoliators and fire on the spruce-moss forest
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The lichen woodland is one of the most important forest ecosystems in North America, dominating the central part of the boreal forest. The southernmost lichen woodland is paradoxically in the heart of the southern boreal forest. This distribution prompted this study aiming to identify the factors responsible for the inception and development of the lichen woodland at its southern range limit in eastern Canada. We tested the hypothesis that the southern lichen-spruce woodland is a regressive, post-fire type of the spruce-moss forest. We studied adjacent lichen-spruce and spruce-moss stands growing under similar soil conditions. We reconstructed the recent history of spruce-moss forest transformation to lichen woodland using tree size, tree ring patterns, and macrofossil analysis of organic soil. All the plant macrofossils buried in the unburned organic mat below the charcoal layer of the last fire corresponded to a feather-moss forest assemblage and included head capsules of the spruce budworm (Choristoneura fumiferana (Clem.)) or European spruce sawfly (Gilpinia hercyniae Hartig.). The impact of combined insect and fire disturbances translates into a dramatic decrease in post-fire tree regeneration of the forest inducing the shift to lichen woodland. The inception of the southern lichen woodland highlights the fragility of the spruce-moss forest even in the core area of the southern commercial boreal forest.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".