Recent changes in forest structure and growth at the alpine‐treeline ecotone in the Rocky and Columbia Mountains of central British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Aim Globally, forests at the alpine‐treeline ecotone (ATE) are considered sensitive to warming temperatures; however, responses to recent climate change show high variability and many underlying processes remain unclear. This study aims to provide further insight into possible ATE forest responses to climate change by examining spatiotemporal patterns in recent tree regeneration and growth responses to climate across treeline forms. Location This study is situated at the ATE in the Rocky Mountain and Columbia Mountain ranges in central British Columbia, Canada. Taxon Gymnosperms – subalpine fir ( Abies lasiocarpa Hooker (Nutall)). Methods We collected tree and stand data from 48 plots across five study sites. Plots were distributed across three treeline stand types: (i) islands; (ii) abrupt; and (iii) fringes of regeneration adjacent to tree islands. We used a dendrochronological approach to analyse the ages of recently established trees in fringe stand types, detect long‐term trends in annual tree growth and quantify climate‐growth relationships. Results Seedling recruitment adjacent to tree islands occurred over a period of approximately 40 years (1960–2000), with two regeneration “pulses” in the late 1970s and 1980s. Abrupt and fringe trees showed a similar age structure and annual radial growth has increased in most trees over the past 30 years. Across the study region and stand types, summer temperature has the strongest influence on radial growth. Over the past 70 years, growth in tree islands has become increasingly correlated with growing season temperature variables. Main Conclusions Forest growth and structure have changed in coherent spatial and temporal patterns over recent decades at the ATE in central BC. Projections for sustained warming in this region will likely result in increased tree growth and potential continued expansion of forests into untreed areas below the treeline. These changes will have implications for hydrological regimes, wildlife habitat and carbon sequestration.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".