Serpentine Plant Life of Western North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Serpentine plant life varies dramatically across western North America from north to south and, to a lesser extent, from the coast inland. At the latitudinal extremes in Alaska and Baja California, it follows patterns seen in other climatically harsh parts of the world (as discussed in chapter 10), but the species composition is not very distinctive and there are few endemics. In between, in Washington, Oregon, and especially in the California Floristic Province, lies a great diversity of distinctive serpentine vegetation types and endemic species. This chapter outlines the coarse patterns of variation in vegetation structure and endemic species richness across this region, as a prelude to chapter 12, which describes specific serpentine vegetation types in detail. Little has been published about the serpentine vegetation of Alaska and the Yukon. The Serpentine Slide Research Natural Area in central Alaska was described by Juday (1992) as having a mixture of white spruce (Picea glauca) and paper birch (Betula papyrifera) with Rosa acicularis, Juniperus communis, and Vaccinium uliginosum in the understory. Several herbs are shared with Swedish serpentines (e.g., Campanula rotundifolia, Minuartia rubella, Rumex acetosa, Saxifraga oppositifolia, Silene acaulis); several others showed northern range extensions on serpentine (see chapter 9). The ultramafic vegetation of Golden Mountain in southeast Alaska was described by Alexander et al. (1989) as alpine meadow containing forbs, graminoids, and low shrubs, with a transition through low shrubs and stunted lodgepole pines (Pinus contorta) down to spruce (Picea sitchensis)–hemlock (mainly Tsuga mertensiana) forest, with shrubs and some cedar (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis). The forest to alpine transition was lower on serpentine than on other soils. No serpentine endemic species are known from this region. From south–central British Columbia to central Oregon, serpentine has been described by Kruckeberg (1969, 1992) as supporting open stands of various conifers, which are either a subset of the species occurring in adjacent denser forests on other soils or represent elevational or geographic range shifts. Understories are sparse and may include graminoids, perennial forbs, and shrubs. On rocky ridgetops and at higher elevations and latitudes, these conifer plant communities give way gradually to alpine tundra.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".