Stand openness predicts hair lichen (Bryoria) abundance in the lower canopy, with implications for the conservation of Canada’s critically imperiled Deep-Snow Mountain Caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tree-dwelling hair lichens in the genus Bryoria provide crucial late-winter forage for Deep-Snow Mountain Caribou (DSC), an imperiled ungulate endemic to south-central British Columbia, Canada. Because DSC survival requires continuous access to heavy hair lichen loadings, conservation efforts can benefit from an improved understanding of the factors that contribute to such loadings. Here we quantify the relation of Bryoria abundance to stand spacing by testing an “Angle-To-Canopy-Skyline” (ATCS) protocol as a measure of stand openness and a proxy for ventilation. Fieldwork conducted in 60-year-old conifer forests on a 250-m conical volcano within the range of DSC yielded three principal findings: (1) Bryoria abundance strongly increases with increasing stand openness; (2) Pinus contorta supports much heavier Bryoria loadings than other local host trees; and (3) ATCS is a powerful predictor of arboreal hair lichen abundance in general across a wide range of environmental settings, but does not predict the abundance of foliose lichens. We suggest that canopy openness, at least within the range of DSC, complements stand age as a key factor in the development of heavy Bryoria loadings, consistent with the hypothesis that Bryoria benefits from rapid drying after rain. The possibility that anomalously high Bryoria abundance on Pinus may hold promise for accelerated DSC habitat restoration following clearcut logging is explored but rejected.
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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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".