Emergence of anthropogenic fire regimes in the southern boreal of Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While radiative forcing and thus land surface temperatures have been shown to positively correlate with fire severity, precipitation, and lightning strike frequency, the effects of human activity on fire regimes remain difficult to disentangle from geophysical drivers given co-variation between these factors. Here, I analyze fire regimes in the 1919-2012 period across Canada and compare national trends to those of a latitudinal and elevational gradient in a regionexperiencing exponentially increased anthropogenic activity in recent decades. Located along the Canadian Rocky Mountains, the region is intended to serve as a proxy for future continental conditions under current anthropogenic trajectories. Based on the findings, I argue that, for the first time in millennia, fire regimes in the southern boreal zone have shifted on average from large, lightning-caused fires to frequent, small, human-caused fires adjacent to human transportation corridors. While warming is known to produce more severe fuel conditions, human factors such as frequent fire ignitions, active fire suppression, industrial and recreational activity, and forestry (i.e., stand aging) likely explain the reduction in mean fire size and annual area burned. Here, I provide the first evidence of a southern boreal transition to Anthropocene fire regimes without historical analogue, representing a dramatic departure from the conditions in which these forests evolved. With ~28 Pg carbon stored in Canada’s managed forests and interspecific variation in albedo, these novel fire regimes carry direct implications for the Earth’s climate system.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".