Efficacy of delayed entry low branch sanitation pruning in preventing mortality of western white pine infected with white pine blister rust
Bibliographic record
Abstract
White pine blister rust, caused by the fungus Cronartium ribicola J. C. Fisch., is a virulent mortality agent of five-needle pines like western white pine (Pinus monticola D. Don.). For decades, low branch pruning has been recommended as a control by removing cankers that can migrate from infected branches to the tree stem and kill the host. These recommendations are mainly based on studies done on eastern white pine (Pinus strobus L.), or on western white pine growing primarily in the Interior Pacific Northwest of the United States. It is not clear whether these recommendations are transferable to geographically and climatically dissimilar Pacific coastal areas, where pruning often shows little benefit in commercial forest plantations. We summarize over 30 years of post-treatment data from coastal and interior sites in British Columbia. Sanitation pruning was done on 12–22-year-old stands using one or two pruning lifts and infection and mortality were tracked over the subsequent decades. Our results show that while pruning had little negative effect on treated tree height or diameter growth, mortality was not significantly different between treated and untreated groups across all sites. Cumulative mortality after three decades was >80% for coastal sites, and nearly 60% for the interior site, indicating a lack of treatment efficacy. Our results differ from earlier shorter duration studies and those from other jurisdictions. It is clear that delaying pruning until trees are older and carrying many existing branch and stem infections results in ineffective control of rust in coastal white pine stands.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".