Taxonomy of <i>Astragalus robbinsii</i> var. <i>fernaldii</i> (Fabaceae): molecular and morphological analyses support transfer to <i>Astragalus eucosmus</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Astragalus robbinsii var. fernaldii , Fernald’s milkvetch, is a taxon of conservation concern currently due for reassessment of its provincial and federal conservation status. Restricted to a narrow region spanning Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec, its taxonomic position with respect to two congeners, Astragalus eucosmus and Astragalus robbinsii var. minor , is poorly understood. To clarify the taxonomy of Fernald’s milkvetch, we studied variation in the ycf6–trnC and trnC–rpoB chloroplast DNA (cpDNA) spacers, generated amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) genotypes, and conducted a morphometric analysis. Parsimony and Bayesian analysis of the cpDNA data distinguished A. robbinsii var. minor from A. eucosmus and the majority of Fernald's milkvetch samples; both cpDNA and AFLP analysis were highly suggestive of gene flow between taxa and populations. Morphometric analysis indicates that Fernald's milkvetch is closer to A. eucosmus than to A. robbinsii var. minor in overall form and stipe length, while pubescence was not taxonomically informative. Based on these results, the recognition of Fernald's milkvetch is unwarranted; we recommend that the taxon be transferred to A. eucosmus.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".