Effects of precommercial thinning on the forest value chain in northwestern New Brunswick: Part 4 – Lumber production, quality and value
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Forty-eight years after application, three nominal precommercial thinning (PCT) spacings of 4 ft (1.2 m), 6 ft (1.8 m) and 8 ft (2.4 m) were compared to an unthinned control in six replicate, balsam fir (Abies balsamea [L.] Mill.)-dominated stands. Within three of these replicates chosen for clearcut harvest in 2008, a total of 150 trees were bucked into 479 sawlogs that produced 10 829 board feet of lumber. PCT had a positive impact on Premium lumber grade recovery per tree, increasing it from an average of 9 foot board measure (fbm) in the unthinned control plots, to 22 fbm in plots nominally spaced to 8 ft (p = 0.02). No. 2 & Better grade yields increased from 42 to 76 fbm/tree in these same sets of plots (p < 0.01). PCT to 6 ft and 8 ft increased the production of 2×4 and 2×6 lumber over the control (p ≤ 0.04). Stand-level gross total product value increased between 11% and 23% in thinned stands (estimated at +$3000 to +$6600 per ha, p < 0.01). PCT had no appreciable effect on sawn lumber wood density (p ≥ 0.26) or lumber stiffness (MOE; ≤-6.2%, p ≥ 0.11), but had a negative effect on lumber strength (MOR; ≤ -13.4%, p ≤ 0.03) and wood basic density at stump height (≤- 7%; p < 0.01). MDF panel properties were generally good, regardless of spacing. We recommend thinning young balsam fir stands to a maximum nominal spacing of 6 ft (1.2 m) to maintain satisfactory lumber mechanical properties and maximize product value per hectare.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".