Dune colonization in the Bald Head Hills, southwestern Manitoba
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In order to document the micro-environment, vegetation, and successional patterns in the Bald Head Hills in southwestern Manitoba, one of the few extensive sand prairie habitats in Canada, we studied four sites representing different successional stages.Sites were selected based on varying proportions of bare sand and vegetation cover.At each site we collected soil samples, recorded soil and air temperatures, soil moisture, rainfall, and sand movement.We also sampled vegetation cover and plant rooting depths.All sites were xeric, with medium texture, nutrient poor, sandy soil with good to excessive drainage.Soil organic content, moisture, and nutrient retention increased from the earliest to the latest stage of colonization.Soil moisture of the latest stage was depleted during the growing season, while that at deeper levels (40-60 cm) of the early stages were not.Local sand accretion and erosion rates differed from year to year.Overall short-term sand movement was 0.2 m yr!, less than that reported for other dune systems.Long-term sand movement in the leading edge of the dune system, determined from 1948, 1974, and 1994 aerial photographs, was negligible, but vegetation cover increased from 14 to 66%.In our samples mean plant cover increased from < 3% in Site I to 73% in Site IV while the number of species increased from 11 to 75.Many of these species displayed typical adaptations to drought, including leaf modifications, photosynthetic pathways, and root types.Andropogon gerardi, Oryzopsis hymenoides, Petalostemum candidum, and Koeleria cristata characterized early successional stages, and Bouteloua gracilis, Stipa spartea, Cladonia spp., and Selaginella densa, later stages.Changes in species composition were highly correlated with soil organic content.The stresses imposed by mobile sand are important factors in limiting plant establishment on the open sand, while drought and temperature extremes limit plant growth on partially and fully stabilized dunes.
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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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".