Microclimate engineers: how lichen cover impacts soil temperature, moisture, and nutrient availability on mine tailings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Iron mining is an important economic activity in the North American Canadian Shield but has caused large‐scale disturbance and physical upheaval of boreal ecosystems. Lichens grow abundantly on abandoned iron ore mine tailings as early successional taxa, yet their role in the successional processes of these post‐industrial landscapes is not fully understood. Accounting for the impacts of nonvascular vegetation such as lichens is a key but often overlooked area for improving restoration outcomes. We investigated how lichens could facilitate natural revegetation on mine tailings through three potential mechanisms: amelioration of soil temperature, soil moisture, and nutrient availability. Through experiments in the field and in the greenhouse, we studied how lichens modify the microenvironment for saplings of Pinus banksiana Lamb. (jack pine) and Populus balsamifera L. (balsam poplar) on mine tailings. Lichens significantly increased the water content of the mine tailings and kept soil temperature cooler than exposed tailings. They were also found to intercept nitrogen deposition, specifically of nitrate. Lichens play a critical role as microclimate engineers in this ecosystem and its succession after intensive mining.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".