Soil and plant legacies associated with harvest trails in boreal black spruce forests
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The practice of careful logging has been mandated in northeastern Canada’s coniferous and mixedwood forests as a means of protecting natural regeneration while minimizing soil disturbance by machinery. This practice imposes evenly spaced, parallel trails for circulation of harvesting machinery, while most of the understory and soil is left intact in wide protection strips between the trails. The objective of this study was to examine soil physico-chemical and microbial properties, and ericaceous shrub performance (aboveground biomass) following careful logging and with or without subsequent scarification. By sampling 32 cutover forest sites (formerly black spruce-dominated) in the Abitibi-Temiscamingue region of boreal northwestern Quebec, we evaluated how (a) the presence of alternating bands of protection strips and skid trails (on non-scarified sites), and (b) a scarification treatment consisting of mixing the soil organic layer with the surface mineral soil, influenced soil and vegetation properties over time (4–15 years after careful logging). On non-scarified sites, careful logging showed a differential compaction pattern consisting of bands of disturbed zones or trails alternating with protection zones. Both soil properties and ericaceous shrub biomass estimates tracked these alternating compacted and non-compacted areas on the cutover. Soil N (Nt), soil percentage microbial C to total C (Cmic/Ct), and Kalmia angustifolia (Kalmia) and Vaccinium spp. (Vaccinium) aboveground biomass differed on strips and trails 8 and 15 years after harvest. The observed differences in ericaceous shrub biomass between strips and trails, and correlations between biomass and soil variables, suggest potential shrub interference with soil processes. These observations suggest that ericaceous species may promote differences in soil properties and plant communities that result in a long-term spatial signature perpetuating the trail pattern. Scarification reduced Kalmia and Vaccinium aboveground biomass and had a negative effect on Cmic/Nmic and Cmic/Ct, 15 years after harvest. Forest understory plants, such as ericaceous shrubs, may play a key role in driving belowground properties, forest regeneration, and long-term succession on these sites. Understanding the ecology and spatial distribution of these species may thus have important implications for ecosystem structure and function as well as timber production.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".