Vulnerability of Conifer Regeneration to Spruce Budworm Outbreaks in the Eastern Canadian Boreal Forest
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Spruce budworm (Choristoneura fumiferana) is the main defoliator of conifer trees in North American boreal forests, affecting extensive areas and causing marked losses of timber supplies. In 2017, spruce budworm affected more than 7 million ha of Eastern Canadian forest. Defoliation was particularly severe for black spruce (Picea mariana (Mill.) B.S.P.), one of the most important commercial trees in Canada. During the last decades, intensive forest exploitation practices have created vast stands of young balsam fir (Abies balsamea (L.) Mill.) and black spruce. Most research focused on the impacts of spruce budworm has been on mature stands; its effects on regeneration, however, have been neglected. This study evaluates the impacts of spruce budworm on the defoliation of conifer seedlings (black spruce and balsam fir) in clearcuts. We measured the cumulative and annual defoliation of seedlings within six clearcut black spruce stands in Quebec (Canada) that had experienced severe levels of defoliation due to spruce budworm. For all sampled seedlings, we recorded tree species, height class, and distance to the residual forest. Seedling height and species strongly influenced defoliation level. Small seedlings were less affected by spruce budworm activity. As well, cumulative defoliation for balsam fir was double that of black spruce (21% and 9%, respectively). Distance to residual stands had no significant effect on seedling defoliation. As insect outbreaks in boreal forests are expected to become more severe and frequent in the near future, our results are important for adapting forest management strategies to insect outbreaks in a context of climate change.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
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 it