Canopy gap disturbance and succession in trembling aspen dominated boreal forests in northeastern Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canopy gaps play an important role in forest vegetation dynamics when fire return intervals are long. However, there is little known about the role of gaps in the development of forest stands that initially dominate following stand-replacing disturbance. We investigated gap disturbance during the breakup of trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides Michx.) stands at two scales: at the stand level we quantified gap fraction and gap size as stand development proceeds; at the gap level we determined causes of gap-maker mortality and evaluated resulting gap-maker structure and decay as stand development proceeds. We also evaluated the impact that gaps have on stand transition by quantifying the abundance and growth of juvenile trees in gaps of different sizes and ages. Ten stands between 60 and 120 years since fire in northeastern Ontario were sampled using line intersect transects. Gap fraction doubled (∼18%36%) and mean gap size was more than four times greater (∼45200 m 2 ) over the time period. Standing dead gap makers in early states of decay were most frequent in young stands, whereas snapped gap makers in various states of decay were most frequent in old stands. Infection by fungal pathogens was the most frequent cause of mortality (56%) and was not related to time since fire. Balsam fir (Abies balsamea (L.) Mill.) was the most abundant juvenile recruit. However, transition probabilities for tree species were independent of gap type. These results indicate that gap creation is frequent during early stages of stand development in boreal forests; however, it is unlikely that successional trajectory is affected by their formation.
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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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".