How much is too much? How do biomass harvesting, site preparation intensity, and wood ash applications alter plant community recovery of a second growth boreal jack pine forest?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
More intensive forest management practices have been suggested as a means to meet increasing demands for forestry products, particularly those for renewable energy. In this study, we compare plant community composition, structure, and function in response to a gradient of silvicultural practices in a second growth jack pine forest ( Pinus banksiana Lamb.) in northern Ontario, Canada. Five combinations of biomass harvest and site preparation disturbance intensities, including landings (wood processing area) from the previous harvest were compared six years after planting. Additionally, two wood ash amendment treatments were included to explore the ameliorative effects of ash application. We found more intensive treatments that had large amounts of biomass harvested, forest floor removal, and high soil compaction, changed plant community composition. The plant communities of the intensive treatments had low taxonomic and functional diversity, and were characterized by low vegetation cover, a high prevalence of short, shade intolerant species, and an underdeveloped vertical structure. The less intensive treatments, including Tree-length harvest and the two ash amendment treatments, had similar taxonomic and functional composition to the Full-tree harvest treatment and were comprised of vascular and non-vascular plant species typically associated with mature boreal forest communities. These findings underscore the importance of establishing biomass harvest guidelines that preserve ecologically significant conditions and attributes to safeguard biological legacies and facilitate ecosystem-level recovery, including minimizing forest floor disturbance and maintaining a balance of fine and coarse woody debris. • A wide intensity gradient was used to identify disturbance thresholds that limits recovery. • Intense biomass removal treatments had low diversity, low cover and poor vertical structure. • Low-intensity treatments better supported boreal forest recovery. • No detrimental, nor beneficial, effects of ash on plant communities were found.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 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 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".