Fire and lichen dynamics in the Taiga Shield of the Northwest Territories and implications for barren‐ground caribou winter forage
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Questions Fire is the main disturbance agent in boreal forests and has profound effects on vegetation composition and structure, including terrestrial lichens that provide critical winter forage for barren‐ground caribou. What is the influence of fire on forest structure and the distribution and species assemblage of forage lichens? What is the current or potential effect of climate change on forage lichen in the boreal forest? Location High Boreal, Low Subarctic, and High Subarctic ecoregions of the Taiga Shield Ecozone in the Northwest Territories, Canada. Methods We used fire history data, satellite and air photo images, and field sampling to determine fire history and severity, and subsequent effects on tree and lichen species composition, in a 880,000 ha study area in the winter range of the Bathurst caribou herd. Results We found that low‐ and mixed‐severity fires were more common than high‐severity fires, and that forest fire severity increased with distance to treeline. Forest structure and composition were more important drivers of lichen cover than fire severity or time since fire. Conclusions While fire had a dominant role in forest structure and composition, the effects on lichen availability were due more to variation in tree growth. We found little evidence of changes in fire regime over the length of our reconstructions (approximately 200 years); however, increases in temperature and the positive relationship between temperature and fire frequency may lead to shortened fire cycles causing a reduction in the availability of forage lichens through burning.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".