Changes in Understory Composition of Rural North American Temperate Forests after a 14-Year Period with Focus on Exotic and Sensitive Plant Species
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A better understanding of the mechanisms influencing compositional changes in understory plant communities is crucial to protect temperate forests against global change stressors, including anthropogenic disturbances and invasion by exotic species. We assessed changes in species composition after a 14-year period in 20 rural temperate forest stands located in the northern hardwood biome of eastern Canada. We identified species that underwent the largest changes in relative occurrence during that period and assessed the influence of biotic and anthropogenic filters on the trajectory of those understory communities. We found small but significant compositional changes after 14 years, mostly related to a decrease in species diversity in the younger forest stands originating from abandoned pasture. The largest occurrence gains for understory species were observed in these stands, but also in stands with lower understory community diversity. Understory species occurrence losses could not be linked to any of the biotic and anthropogenic filters considered in this study presumably because they were difficult to isolate from secondary successional dynamics. Shade tolerant exotic species showed a small but significant increase in relative occurrence over 14 years, with notable gains in only a few stands. We observed generalized occurrence gains for sensitive spring geophytes during the same period throughout most sites. Overall, the understory vegetation community of rural temperate forests in this region was found to be relatively stable and seems to retain its potential for natural recovery after disturbance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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".