Moose browsing, understorey structure and plant species composition across spruce budworm‐induced forest edges
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Question To what extent do forest edges created by an insect outbreak influence patterns of moose browsing severity, understorey structure and species composition? Location Balsam fir‐dominated boreal forest in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, Nova Scotia, CA. Methods We sampled understorey vegetation (moose browsing damage, sapling density, plant composition, diversity) in contiguous 1‐m 2 quadrats along six 120‐m transects across the forested edges of insect outbreak areas. Patterns of each response variable across the disturbed area–forest gradient were determined using generalized additive mixed models. Randomization tests and wavelet analyses were used to estimate the extent of edge/forest influence and location of abrupt change along the edge‐to‐interior gradient, respectively. Results Most saplings in the disturbed area were severely browsed and shorter than those in adjacent intact forest. Although moose preferred to browse on tall saplings, shorter saplings were severely browsed in the disturbed area. Compared to the forest, the disturbed area was characterized by more shade‐intolerant species, increased graminoid cover and reduced bryophyte cover. Distance of edge influence did not extend into the forest for almost all response variables. Abrupt changes in understorey vegetation occurred at various distances on both sides of the edge. Conclusions Severe moose browsing in the disturbed area is preventing forest regeneration, resulting in the persistence of forest edges that would typically disappear after the collapse of an insect outbreak. Different assessments of the forest edge revealed different results; locations of abrupt change in understorey vegetation occurred even where plant communities were not significantly different than reference forest and disturbed areas. This study reveals that the combined effects of a small insect defoliator and a large ungulate can substantially affect landscape dynamics.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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".