Red foxes enhance long‐term tree growth near the Arctic treeline
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Recent climate warming is expected to increase tree growth and productivity, substantially altering ecological function and boundaries in northern ecosystems. Although climate largely determines the range and growth of trees in any biome, variations in microsite conditions can influence growth on a finer scale. Red foxes ( Vulpes vulpes ) are found in most terrestrial ecosystems and are considered ecosystem engineers through their denning activities. Added soil nutrients from prey remains, feces, and urine could benefit tree growth on dens in subarctic regions by alleviating soil nutrient limitations. We examined growth in white spruce ( Picea glauca ) trees growing on eight red fox dens and paired control sites at the Arctic treeline. Radial growth was 55% higher for trees on dens than on control sites between 1897 and 2017, despite similarities in tree ages and densities. This enhanced growth was more pronounced in younger trees, consistent with the decrease in growth with age among all trees. By promoting tree growth near the treeline, red foxes may act as hotspots for tree reproduction. Although the impacts on tree growth largely depend on the spatial distribution of dens, predators can create distinct microhabitats across the landscape, leading to increased vegetation productivity, persisting over many decades.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.036 | 0.001 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".