From delayed succession to alternative successional trajectory: How different moose browsing pressures contribute to forest dynamics following clear‐cutting
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Aims Selective browsing can be a chronic disturbance that reduces the survival, growth and reproduction of individual species and shapes the composition and structure of plant communities. Along with other disturbances that perturb the forest ecosystem, browsing may thus affect forest regeneration and successional trajectories after an acute perturbation such as clear‐cutting. However, effects of different browsing pressures on plant species, communities and ultimately succession remain hard to predict. Methods We implemented a browsing exclusion experiment ( n = 15 sites) along a gradient of moose browsing pressure to investigate how this factor influenced the early‐successional trajectory of boreal forests following clear‐cutting in eastern Canada. We used Principal Response Curve analyses to compare the trajectory of the plant communities depending on site‐specific moose browsing pressure and analyzed the trajectory of individual species leveraging these curves. Results Our results show that all browsing pressures lead to alterations in plant communities when compared to exclosures, but the effect was stronger under heavier browsing pressure. Under heavier browsing pressure, we observed a lower ground cover of balsam fir, an increased ground cover of raspberry, reaching more than 60%, and a lower abundance of saplings for balsam fir, birches and rowan. Conclusions This study demonstrated that forest response to browsing is a function of local browsing pressure and that moose mainly slowed forest succession toward a closed canopy. However, heavier browsing pressure, through reduced sapling abundance and the resulting increased cover of competitive raspberry, may delay forest succession and push the ecosystem toward an alternative successional trajectory. As heavy selective browsing can interact with anthropogenic disturbances to determine forest succession, we recommend strong integration of the forest and wildlife management sectors to promote sustainability.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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 it