Porcupine Feeding Scars and Climatic Data Show Ecosystem Effects of the Solar Cycle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using North American porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum) feeding scars on trees as an index of past porcupine abundance, we have found that porcupine populations have fluctuated regularly over the past 130 years in the Bas St. Laurent region of eastern Quebec, with superimposed periodicities of 11 and 22 years. Coherency and phase analyses showed that this porcupine population cycle has closely followed the 11- and 22-year solar activity cycles. Fluctuations in local precipitation and temperature were also cyclic and closely related to both the solar cycle and the porcupine cycle. Our results suggest that the solar cycle indirectly sets the rhythm of population fluctuations of the most abundant vertebrate herbivore in the ecosystem we studied. We hypothesize that the solar cycle has sufficiently important effects on the climate along the southern shore of the St. Lawrence estuary to locally influence terrestrial ecosystem functioning. This constitutes strong evidence for the possibility of a causal link between solar variability and terrestrial ecology at the decadal timescale and local spatial scale, which confirms results obtained at greater temporal and spatial scales.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".