Effects of partial harvesting on vertebrate species associated with late-successional forests in Ontario’s boreal region
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the boreal forest region, partial-harvest silviculture has been garnering increasing interest as a means of maintaining wildlife species and habitat structure associated with late-successional forests. If late-successional species can find suitable habitat in partially harvested stands with a given level of structural retention, then partial harvesting might represent a viable silvicultural tool for maintaining wildlife dependent on mature or old-forest habitat within managed stands over time. Here we summarize literature on the responses of late-successional amphibians, birds, and mammals in Ontario’s boreal region to various intensities of partial harvesting. We assess species responses from comparisons of habitat use in harvested and unharvested stands; we do not explicitly consider impacts of partial harvesting applied over large areas across the landscape. At the stand scale, light-intensity harvesting (70% retention) negatively affects several passerine birds, as well as spruce grouse winter habitat, but most late-successional species (including all mammals and amphibians considered) appear to be tolerant of this level of habitat alteration. Moderate-intensity harvesting (50% retention) was found to reduce the abundance of about 40% of the species considered, particularly cavity- and snag-dependent species (martens, northern flying squirrels, owls) and passerine birds that forage or nest in the canopy and understory. High-intensity (30% retention) partial harvesting was found to provide unsuitable habitat for about one quarter of all late-successional species, including most forest raptors, pileated and black-backed woodpeckers, brown creepers, northern flying squirrels, and woodland caribou. Also, studies indicate that additional passerine bird species would decrease in abundance, as would small, moisture-dependent, terrestrial species such as short-tailed shrews, red-backed voles, and eastern red-backed salamanders. There is a need to strengthen our understanding of responses to partial harvesting for nonpasserine birds and large mammals, and to verify species responses through experimental studies within Ontario’s boreal region. Key words: structural retention, selection, shelterwood, seed tree, cavities, snags, downed woody debris, habitat suitability, amphibians, birds, mammals, biodiversity, review
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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) | 0.000 | 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".