Soil moisture strongly limits Douglas-fir seedling establishment near its upper elevational limit in the southern Rocky Mountains
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Climate change is causing significant shifts in tree species distributions to higher elevations and latitudes. Seed germination and seedling establishment are particularly important steps in tree range expansion under warmer conditions, yet seedling establishment is influenced by a range of factors beyond temperature, including herbivory, microenvironment, and the timing and amount of precipitation. We conducted an experiment to assess how augmented precipitation regimes, wildlife herbivory, and microclimate influence germination and first-season survival of Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco) near the upper elevational limit of its range in the southern Rocky Mountains. Germination was strongly influenced by moisture, with over three times higher germination in watered treatments. Seedling survival was similar across watered treatments but was negatively associated with microenvironments with higher maximum temperatures. These results indicate that soil moisture effects on germination and the negative impact of hot growing-season temperatures on seedling survival limit initial seedling establishment in Douglas-fir, even at the cooler and wetter end of its range, suggesting that the planting of this species will be most successful in cooler and wetter microsites. Taken together, this study suggests that continued warming and projected increases in droughts may strongly limit Douglas-fir regeneration and thus its ability to shift upwards with climate change.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".