Human–vegetation interactions during the Holocene in North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between the initial colonization of North America and the European settlement period, Indigenous American land use practices shaped North American landscapes and ecosystems, but a critical question is the extent of these impacts on the land, and how these influenced the distributions of the flora and fauna. The present study addresses this question by estimating the spatial correlation between continental-scale records of fossil pollen and archaeological radiocarbon data, and provides a detailed analysis of the spatiotemporal relationship between palaeo-populations and ten important North American pollen taxa. Maps of Indigenous American population density, based on the Canadian Archaeological Radiocarbon Database, are compared to maps of plant abundance as estimated by pollen records from the Neotoma Paleoecology Database, using nonparametric kernel estimators and cross-correlation techniques. Periods of high spatial cross-correlation (either positive or negative) between population density and plant abundance were identified, but these associations were intermittent and did not increase towards the present. In many cases, high values of population density corresponded with high values of a particular taxon in one region, but simultaneously corresponded with low values in other regions, lessening the overall correlation between the two fields. This analysis suggests that human impacts were not significant enough to be identified at a continental scale, either due to low population numbers or land use, implying significant impacts of ancient human activities on the vegetation were regional rather than continental.
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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 | 0.000 | 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".