Directional succession and species-specific patterns observed in repeat study of vascular plants at three glacier foreland chronosequences in the Canadian High Arctic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The expanding area of glacier forelands provides new terrain for ecosystem development. Plant succession facilitates this development, but this process remains poorly documented in marginal environments such as the High Arctic. This paper presents the results of the first repeat study of glacier foreland chronosequences conducted in the Canadian High Arctic. The forelands of Twin Glacier, Beitstad Glacier, and Teardrop Glacier near Alexandra Fiord, Ellesmere Island, Nunavut were first surveyed in 1995, and these surveys were repeated 21 years later using the same methods. The objectives of this study were to document the patterns of vascular plant species composition and abundance across these three forelands to (1) determine the accuracy of the hypothesis from the original study that succession on these forelands was directional, and (2) investigate the use of the chronosequence method in High Arctic succession studies. Forelands were surveyed using % cover estimates or presence/absence counts. Indicator species analysis and rates of change were used to quantify shifts in vascular plant species over time. Total plant cover increased by 2.4% in the first 100 m of the Twin Glacier foreland study area, and species richness also increased on younger terrain. Rates of peak cover and first appearance advance varied greatly between species and forelands, but were generally faster for graminoid and forb species than shrub species, and slower on species-poor Beitstad Glacier foreland. At all three forelands there was a general pattern of directional succession as all species advanced towards the retreating glacier margin. This supports the original hypothesis that directional succession is a common pattern for glacier forelands in the High Arctic. However, we also found that species-specific patterns and rates of change acted to create assemblages that differed between 1995 and 2016. Different abundances of species and successional trajectories were observed between the three forelands, pointing to the importance of local species pools and dispersal limitation. Finally, we observed that the first occurrence of most species was further from the glacier margin in 2016 compared to 1995, perhaps due to accelerating rates of glacier retreat. These species-specific patterns, differences between forelands, and the delayed response of vegetation to glacier retreat demonstrate the importance of using repeat studies over time and replication over space to confirm the results observed in High Arctic glacier foreland chronosequence studies.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".