Spontaneous revegetation of mined peatlands in eastern Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many North American peatlands previously mined for horticultural peat have been abandoned recently, allowing natural recolonization to occur. The two dominant methods for peat extraction, hand block-cutting and vacuum-mining, have created distinctly different abandoned surfaces, leading to different recolonization patterns. Both types of exploitation can be found throughout eastern Canada where we conducted a vast survey of 26 abandoned mined peatlands in the provinces of Québec and New Brunswick. The aim of this study is to describe the revegetation patterns and to assess the impact of local and regional variables as well as the time since abandonment on Sphagnum re-colonization. We inventoried the vegetation structure in all trenches (2571) and baulks (2595) of abandoned block-cut areas as well as in all vacuum fields (395) of the mechanically mined areas. We also conducted detailed species relevés in 242 of these peat fields. In comparison to vacuum-mined peatlands, block-cut peatlands regenerated remarkably well. Approximately 80% of all baulks and trenches in block-cut peatlands had 50% or higher cover of ericaceous shrubs compared with only 16% found on vacuum fields. Herb cover in the three types of abandoned fields was similar to that in natural peatlands. However, Sphagnum percent cover was below 2% in baulks and vacuum fields and was 30% on average in the trenches, which is clearly below cover estimates in natural peatlands. Sphagnum cover and richness were both higher in trenches with thin residual peat deposit, and Sphagnum richness increased with latitude. Our surveys revealed that abandoned mined peatlands have a high diversity of peatland vascular plants species and a low diversity of non-peatland species.Key words: cutover peatlands, regeneration, milled peatlands, block-cut peatlands, vacuum-mined peatlands, colonization patterns.
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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) | 0.001 | 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 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".