Commercial thinning effects on growth, yield and mortality in natural lodgepole pine stands in Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is an expected decrease in the short to mid-term timber supply of lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta var. latifolia) in Alberta, Canada due to the impacts of past fires and the mountain pine beetle outbreak. Commercial thinning is a potential option for increasing mid-term sawlog timber supply by decreasing the time needed for individual trees to reach merchantable size, through providing access to fiber earlier in the rotation, and from the ability to keep mature stands on the stump longer. In the current study, we evaluated the effects of commercial thinning in stands of different ages. Stands less than 70 years old at thinning were classified as commercial thinning (CT), whereas stands greater than 70 years at thinning were classified as salvage thinning (ST). Tree growth and survival were measured every five years from 1996 to 2016 in both thinned and unthinned stands. Fifteen years post-thinning, stand volume was less in the thinned stands relative to the unthinned controls. However, when volume removed at thinning was considered, volume gain from thinned stands was greater than that from the controls in both thinning treatments. Individual tree DBH and live crown ratio were also greater in thinned stands relative to controls. Thinning favored diameter gain mostly in the medium-sized trees in CT but both small to medium-sized trees in ST. Thinning reduced mortality in all stands relative to the controls and a maximum of 50% reduction in mortality was observed in CT. Overall, the findings suggest that natural lodgepole pine stands may respond to commercial thinning with a net gain in cumulative volume at final harvest.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
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".