Delivering Sitka spruce with resistance against white pine weevil in British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis [Bong.] Carr) breeding program for resistance against the white pine weevil Pissodes strobi Peck (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) is arguably one of the most successful pest resistance breeding programs for plantation forest species in North America, with a substantial proportion of the planting stock in BC and Washington State currently coming from this breeding program. Using conventional selection and breeding, and by screening Sitka spruce populations using artificial weevil infestations, we identified sources of heritable and stable weevil resistance. We also used this program to investigate potential causes behind this resistance and identified several heritable resistance mechanisms, including anatomical characteristics, such as constitutive resin canals and sclereid cells in the bark, terpene defenses and variation in tree phenology. We concluded that resistance is conferred by a suite of traits whose composition varies among resistant sources. In addition, we evaluated the efficiency of screening for resistance using weevil population enhancement as a screening method. Our results culminated in the establishment of seed orchards, and the availability of resistant seed that is contributing to the return of Sitka spruce as a species of choice in coastal British Columbia.
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 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) | 0.003 | 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".