Early 20<sup>th</sup> Century Climate-Driven Shift in the Dynamics of Forest Tent Caterpillar Outbreaks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using tree-ring analysis, we show that the dynamics of forest tent caterpillar [Malacosoma disstria (Hbn.)] outbreaks in Alberta, Canada shifted at the turn of the 20th century from cyclic, synchronous behaviour 1850-1910 to complex, asynchronous behavior 1910-1993. This shift in dynamics coincided with the emergence in 1910 of a latitudinal gradient in outbreak stability and periodicity reflecting a similar gradient in the periodicity of winter temperatures. We postulate that the synchronizing strength of winter temperatures has diminished as a result of climate warming, and that any synchronizing strength due to inter-population migration has been superseded by regionalized patterns of periodic forcing caused by weak low-frequency variability in winter temperatures. We speculate that a decrease in polar vorticity at the start of the 20th century led to increased meridional jet stream flow and more frequent arctic weather anomalies, resulting in a loss of synchronous decadal periodicity in outbreak occurrence. These changes in insect disturbance probabilities, including rising uncertainty, have profound consequences for forest disturbance risk management.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".