Seed Size, the Only Factor Positively Affecting Direct Seeding Success in an Abandoned Field in Quebec, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Direct tree seeding is potentially an economical technique for restoring forests on abandoned fields. However, the success of tree establishment depends on many factors related to species and seed characteristics, environmental conditions, competition and predation. We compared seedling emergence, survival and growth of six tree species of different seed sizes in a forest restoration project of abandoned fields. Species were seeded in plots with and without herbaceous vegetation and with and without protection from bird and mammal predation. Yellow birch (Betula alleghaniensis) did not emerge in all treatments, paper birch (Betula papyrifera) and tamarack (Larix laricina) had a seedling emergence rate lower than 1%, and sugar maple (Acer saccharum) had a low overall emergence rate of 6%. Seedling emergence reached 57% for northern red oak (Quercus rubra) and 34% for red pine (Pinus resinosa), but survival of oak after one year was much higher (92%) than pine seedlings (16%). Overall, protection from birds and mammals and elimination of the herbaceous vegetation cover had no detectable effects on seedling emergence, survival and height. Nonetheless, red oak seedlings growing in the presence of vegetation had a smaller diameter and shoot biomass and a larger specific leaf area. We conclude that only large seeded species, such as oak, should be used for forest restoration of abandoned fields by direct seeding in our region.
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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".