Impacts of wildfire on subcanopy energy balance, thermal regime, and permafrost stability in peat plateaus at Scotty Creek, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The stability of permafrost in peatland-dominated regions of northwestern Canada is compromised by ongoing climate warming and increased wildfire activity. This study examines an 8-year record of changes to the surface and subsurface properties of a peat plateau following a low-severity wildfire that occurred in 2014 in a region of thawing, discontinuous permafrost. This is accomplished by comparing the burned portion of a peat plateau to two unburned control sites, one of which is the unburned portion of the same plateau that was affected by the fire. Net radiation was not significantly different one year following the wildfire but became increasingly larger at the Burn site in the following years, supplying a surplus of energy available for ground thaw. This increase in energy inputs coincided with the gradual collapse of the remaining standing dead trees, which is supported by a trend of increasing wind speeds. Soil moisture decreased at the Burn in the first 4 years post-fire before returning and maintaining similar moisture content as the adjacent control site. Ground temperatures were consistently warmer in the summer and colder in the winter compared to the adjacent control site. The cooler winter ground temperatures at the burn were attributed to the snowpack being thinner and denser, and thus less insulative, allowing for more energy to escape the subsurface during the winter seasons. This was not enough to offset the increased inputs of energy endured at the Burn over the summer seasons, as the depth to permafrost increased significantly over the study period and no trend was found for the control sites. The average annual rate of permafrost thaw was 9.6 cm/year at the Burn, compared to 5.6 cm/year at the nearby adjacent control site. The most notable finding was a near-continuous talik (perennially frozen) layer beneath the Burn, a feature known to further accelerate permafrost thaw. The thinner active layer at the Burn required less energy to thaw, leaving more energy available to drive other subsurface processes such as increasing ground temperatures and contributing to greater thaw. The combined impacts of the variables examined suggest that wildfire in this area exacerbates permafrost thaw.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 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".