Holocene fire regimes, fire‐related plant functional types, and climate in south‐coastal British Columbia forests
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Paleoecological records of past fire events and forest composition provide long‐term ecological context for modern changes in fire regimes and forest dynamics. Here, we use pollen and contiguous macroscopic charcoal analyses of lake sediments from Pender Island, British Columbia, Canada to reconstruct changes in fire regimes over the last 10,000 years and investigate how these interact with changes in climate and forest composition with a focus on fire‐related plant functional types. The relatively warm and dry early Holocene was characterized by high charcoal accumulation rates, fire episodes of moderate severity, and a mean fire return interval of 100 ± 27 years. Forests at the time were open‐canopy Pseudotsuga menziesii forests with abundant fire endurer taxa (e.g., Pteridium aquilinum ) that have a competitive advantage in regimes of frequent fire. Fire continued to occur every ~100 years, on average, during the establishment of Quercus garryana savanna communities; however, a decrease in charcoal peak magnitudes suggests the fire regime shifted to one characterized by smaller and/or lower intensity surface fires. As temperature and moisture deficits decreased in the mid‐ and late Holocene (i.e., after ~6000 calendar years before present), mean fire return intervals lengthened to 176 ± 54 years and increased variability in charcoal peak magnitudes suggests a mixed fire regime of low‐moderate‐intensity fires combined with infrequent crown or stand‐replacing fires. Relatively stable and moderate climate, longer fire return intervals, and mixed‐severity fires allowed P. menziesii (a fire resister) to dominate closed‐canopy forests and for fire avoiders to gradually become more common forest constituents. Millennial‐scale climate change has acted as the dominant driver of changes in both fire regimes and forest composition over the last 10,000 years; however, changes in fire‐related plant functional types highlight the important role that interactions between vegetation and fire play in long‐term fire regimes and forest dynamics.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.004 |
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".