Forest response to cumulative disturbance and stress: Two decades of change in whitebark pine ecosystems of west-central British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Forests dominated by the endangered tree species whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) are threatened by multiple stresses (fire suppression, climate change) and disturbances (white pine blister rust [Cronartium ribicola], mountain pine beetle [Dendroctonus ponderosae]). To gain insight into how these ecosystems respond, we quantified vegetation change over 2 decades (21–29 y) in xeric and submesic P. albicaulis ecosystems near the northern edge of the species' range on the leeward side of the Coast Mountains of British Columbia, Canada. We compared changes in overstory and understory vegetation composition of these stands to changes in mesic, non-whitebark pine ecosystems in the same region. Multi-response permutation procedure (MRPP) analysis showed that the overstory of xeric whitebark pine ecosystems became compositionally similar to mesic ecosystems, i.e., there was increased dominance by Abies lasiocarpa or Tsuga mertensiana. Yet understory composition in xeric whitebark pine stands changed little and there was continued regeneration of P. albicaulis. Submesic whitebark pine stands developed a dense canopy dominated by T. mertensiana, and although their understories did not become compositionally similar to mesic ecosystems, there was minimal P. albicaulis regeneration. Understory stability in xeric and submesic whitebark pine ecosystems over 21–29 y suggests compositional resilience in these ecosystems to multiple stresses and disturbances. However, ongoing disturbance affecting both overstory and understory P. albicaulis might still result in the loss of this keystone species.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 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".