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as a result of climate warming, and that any synchronizing strength due to inter-population migration has been superseded by regionalized patterns of periodic forcing caused by weak low-frequency variability in winter temperatures.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 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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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".