Frequency of sprout-origin trees in pre-European settlement forests of the southern Appalachian Mountains
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We hypothesized that tree form, recorded in historical public land surveys, would provide a valuable proxy record of regeneration patterns during early-European settlement of North America’s eastern deciduous forest. To test this hypothesis, we tallied stem form from witness trees used in land survey records in the southern Appalachian Mountains from 13 counties spanning four physiographic provinces: Piedmont, Blue Ridge, Ridge and Valley, and Cumberland Plateau. A total of 3% of witness trees used in the land surveys were of sprout origin. American basswood (Tilia americana L.) exhibited the highest proportion of sprout-origin trees at 12%. Other overstory species with a high proportion of sprout-origin trees were hickory (Carya sp.), red maple (Acer rubrum L.), and sycamore (Platanus occidentalis L.), all with 6% of stems being from sprout origin. Blue Ridge had significantly more sprout-origin trees compared with the other three physiographic provinces. Forests in the southern Appalachian Mountains during the pre-European settlement period had a suite of disturbances that controlled their growth and regeneration; however, most of these disturbances did not result in large-scale tree mortality, and therefore, sprouts were not an important source of regeneration.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".