Multiple-pathway succession in coastal <i>Tsuga heterophylla</i>, <i>Thuja plicata</i>, and <i>Abies amabilis</i> forests on northeastern Vancouver Island, British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sustainable forest practices are often designed to mimic natural disturbance and successional processes, yet succession is poorly understood in many ecosystems. On northeastern Vancouver Island, the “disturbance hypothesis” is a widely assumed succession model asserting that shade-tolerant western redcedar (Thuja plicata Donn ex D. Don) and the ericaceous shrub salal (Gaultheria shallon Pursh) invade and colonize highly productive western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla (Raf.) Sarg.) – Pacific silver fir (Abies amabilis Douglas ex J. Forbes) stands (HA) on zonal sites in the absence of stand-replacing wind disturbance. This leads to the development of low-productivity, low-density, uneven-aged, open-crowned redcedar–hemlock–salal stands (CH). In conflict with this model, old, apparently stable HA stands lacking redcedar can be found on such sites as well. We sought evidence for the predicted transition to CH stands by examining stand composition, crown closure, tree size class frequency distributions, salal cover, and redcedar establishment on young HA (∼90 years old), old HA (>160 years), and CH (>160 years) stands. When adjacent to a redcedar stand, young HA stands had fewer redcedar seedlings but more redcedar adult trees than old HA stands. However, redcedar abundance did not differ between young and old HA stands at distances further than 10 m from adjacent redcedar stands. This could indicate that redcedar recruits into HA stands at stand establishment and that redcedar seedling establishment is low under the thick canopy of young HA stands. The chronosequence data also suggest that both old HA and CH stands are self-replacing stand types in these forests, contrary to the disturbance hypothesis. We develop a new, multipathway model for this ecosystem that is based on the chronosequence data and life-history traits of the focal tree species and suggest that disturbance plays a role opposite to the equilibrium model.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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".