Intraspecific and interspecific interactions between three boreal conifer species seedlings: a greenhouse experiment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The growth dynamics of seedlings in mixed conifer plantations or early stages of natural regeneration can be influenced by interactions among seedlings and their capacity to quickly acquire soil resources. We carried out a greenhouse experiment to investigate the growth and N uptake of three widespread conifer species in mono- and multispecific pots at different density levels. Tamarack, black spruce and jack pine seedlings were grown in pots with one to three seedlings per pot, in the absence (N−) or presence of 15 N-enriched fertilization (N+). In monospecific pots, tamarack seedlings had higher apical growth and benefited more from N fertilization than the two other species. Unexpectedly, increasing seedling density did not reduce seedling growth and even stimulated jack pine’s growth and N uptake. In two-species mixtures, jack pine seedlings (1) produced up to 56% and 26% greater biomass than black spruce and tamarack, respectively; (2) achieved ~ 35% higher biomass than in two-seedling monocultures, indicating a stronger intraspecific than interspecific competition for this species; and (3) caused a ~ 20% decline in the biomass of both black spruce and tamarack seedlings relative to monocultures. The three-species mixture achieved similar yield as the most productive three-seedling monoculture and absorbed up to 15% more fertilizer than the three-seedling monocultures. Seedlings in the three-species mixture of the N+ treatment had their biomass increased by on average 16% relative to the three-seedling monocultures. Although these results cannot be extrapolated to predict the future dynamics and structure of mature stands, they clearly indicate that jack pine seedlings are more competitive than the other species in mixtures, particularly under conditions of high nitrogen availability.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".