Increasing spring dryness accelerates transitions toward pyrogenic vegetation in eastern boreal North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ongoing climate change is increasing vegetation flammability, intensifying fire activity in the boreal forests of eastern North America. This situation suggests a potential tipping point in fire regimes, raising critical questions about their impact on the biodiversity and structure of these ecosystems. To gain a deeper understanding of landscape dynamics and ongoing environmental changes, it is essential to understand how this climate, vegetation and fire linkages operate across various temporal and spatial scales. By integrating paleo-datasets (charcoal, pollen, chironomids, and testate amoebae) with model simulations of vapor pressure deficit (VPD) and plant-available soil water (ASW) over the past 8,000 years, we show that drier spring conditions over the last 3,000 years led to fewer but larger and more severe fire episodes, peaking within the last 250 years. This shift in fire regimes promoted an increase in fire-adapted conifer species, particularly Pinus banksiana, across the landscape. These findings challenge previous projections of increased dominance by thermophilous species under climate change scenarios and instead suggest an expansion of pyrophilous vegetation. Such ecological transitions are set to drive significant environmental and socio-economic consequences.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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 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".