A causal inference framework for climate change attribution in ecology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As climate change increasingly affects biodiversity and ecosystem services, a key challenge in ecology is accurate attribution of these impacts. Though experimental studies have greatly advanced our understanding of climate change impacts on ecological systems, experimental results are difficult to generalize to real-world scenarios. To better capture realized impacts, ecologists can use observational data. Disentangling cause and effect using observational data, however, requires careful research design. Here we describe advances in causal inference that can improve climate change attribution in observational settings. Our framework includes five steps: 1) describe the theoretical foundation, 2) choose appropriate observational data sets, 3) design a causal inference analysis, 4) estimate a counterfactual scenario, and 5) evaluate assumptions and results using robustness checks. We then demonstrate this framework using a case study focused on detecting climate change impacts on whitebark pine growth in California’s Sierra Nevada. We conclude with a discussion of challenges and frontiers in ecological climate change attribution. Our aim is to provide an accessible foundation for applying observational causal inference to climate change attribution in ecology.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.087 | 0.180 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".