A 20-year experiment on the effects of deer and hare on eastern hemlock regeneration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis (L.) Carrière) is a shade-tolerant, slow-growing tree once common in forests across the Great Lakes region. It was heavily exploited in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and now experiences limited regeneration across much of its range. This failure to regenerate has been ascribed to poor seedbed conditions, insufficient canopy openings, warmer climate, and browsing by white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus (Zimmermann, 1780)) or snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus Erxleben, 1777). To test whether deer or hare limit hemlock regeneration, we studied >2000 hemlock seedlings inside and adjacent to experimental deer exclosures at 59 sites randomly distributed across hemlock and hemlock-component stands in northern Wisconsin and the western Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the United States. We monitored local deer and hare abundance, seedling growth, and seedling survival for 20 years. Two First Nations reservations showed lower deer density and greater survival and growth of unprotected seedlings than three national forests of the United States. Cohorts of hemlock seedlings protected from deer survived at a rate four times higher than those exposed to deer (59.3% vs. 15.0%) and shared a combined height 5.2 times greater. Hare densities significantly affected seedling survival only within exclosures. This extensive, long-term study identifies deer as the primary factor constraining hemlock regeneration in the region.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".