Floodplain forest dynamics: Half‐century floods enable pulses of geomorphic disturbance and cottonwood colonization along a prairie river
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In dry ecoregions, trees are restricted to river valley floodplains where river water supplements the limited local precipitation. Around the Northern Hemisphere, cottonwoods, riparian poplars, are often predominant trees in floodplain forests and these ecological specialists require floods that create and saturate sand and gravel bars, enabling seedling recruitment. By pairing the interpretation of aerial photographs at approximately decade intervals with dendrochronology, we explored the coordination between river floods, geomorphic disturbance and colonization of plains cottonwoods ( Populus deltoides ) over eight meanders along the Red Deer River in the semi‐arid prairie of western Canada. This river has a relatively natural flow regime and minimal human alteration through the World Heritage Site of Dinosaur Provincial Park. We found that the 50‐year flood of 1954 increased channel migration and produced extensive accretion with downstream expansion of meander lobes and some channel infilling, which was followed by prolific cottonwood colonization. Those processes accompanied the major flood, while bank erosion and cottonwood losses were more gradual and continuous over the past half‐century. Results indicated even greater floodplain and woodland development after an earlier 100‐year flood in 1915. Each flood produced an arcuate band of mature cottonwoods and there were five to seven progressively older woodland bands across the floodplain, with each cottonwood age grouping increasing by about a half‐century. The 700 m wide floodplain was progressively reworked by the river through pulses of channel movement and floodplain and woodland development over approximately 250 years and correspondingly, the oldest cottonwoods were about 250 years old.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".