Balsam fir sawfly defoliation effects on survival and growth quantified from permanent plots and dendrochronology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Balsam fir sawfly (Neodiprion abietis (Harris)) has become a serious pest of young managed balsam fir (Abies balsamea (L.) Mill.) stands in western Newfoundland, Canada. During 1991–2008, a total area of 561 000 hectares was moderate to severely defoliated. We quantified impacts (growth and survival) using data from permanent sample plots (PSPs) and dendrochronology and related these impacts to defoliation severity determined from aerial defoliation data, in order to provide input into a Decision Support System. We analyzed 67 Newfoundland Forest Service PSPs, selected based on severity of defoliation (classes 1–6), stand age and management interventions (pre-commercially thinned vs natural) and measured before and after defoliation (1996–2008). We used Bayesian statistics to combine information from different sources, each having their own limitations and associated uncertainty. No mortality was observed in immature plots 12 years after defoliation, but survival was 54 per cent lower in mature defoliated than in non-defoliated plots. Plots in defoliation class 1 (1 year of moderate, 30–70 per cent, defoliation) showed 22 per cent cumulative growth reduction and complete recovery to pre-defoliation growth increment after 5 years. Plots in defoliation classes 2–6 (one to three consecutive years of severe, 71–100 per cent, defoliation) had mean cumulative growth reductions of 26–40 per cent and did not recover to pre-defoliation levels even 9 years after defoliation ceased. Natural and thinned plots responded similarly to defoliation severity. These results suggest that proactive control measures need to be implemented since impacts are severe, even with only 1 year of severe defoliation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".