Attributing a Causal Agent and Assessing the Severity of Non-Stand Replacing Disturbances in a Northern Hardwood Forest using Landsat-Derived Vegetation Indices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Non-stand-replacing disturbances are major drivers of northern hardwood forest dynamics, but are more challenging to characterize using satellite imagery than stand-replacing events. This study proposes a hurdle approach in which disturbance causal agents are first attributed to permanent sample plots that were either partially harvested, had sustained damage from an ice storm or remained undisturbed during the observation period, reaching an overall accuracy of 82.9%. Ordinary least square regression was then used to develop disturbance-specific models to assess the severity of partial harvests and damage from ice storms, with r-squared values of 0.57 and 0.59, respectively. The disturbance-specific models included a different set of predictors, confirming the importance of attributing a causal agent to a disturbance before assessing its severity. The sequence of models was implemented regionally to produce severity maps for two disturbance events, revealing within-stand variability in the severity that could be useful for the planning of future silvicultural actions. Although the proposed models offer acceptable performance, more research is needed to include additional disturbance agents and develop models that better capture the small variations in the spectral reflectance caused by low-severity disturbances, especially in the case of low-intensity partial harvests.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".