Phylogeography of the Barred Owl (<i>Strix varia</i>): Species limits, multiple refugia, and range expansion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Barred Owl (Strix varia) is a common nonmigratory owl distributed across southern Canada, south to California in the west, and to Texas and Florida in the east, with isolated populations in central Mexico. We examined the genetic structure of Barred Owl populations throughout their range using 500–600 base pairs each of one nuclear and three mitochondrial genes. In 75% of the shortest trees and 64% of the bootstrapped trees, Barred Owls were not monophyletic; rather, S. v. sartorii of Mexico was separated from the remaining taxa of S. varia by S. fulvescens of Central America. Consequently, the Barred Owls of Mexico are a species-level taxon. There was a large component (32%) of genetic variance distributed among population samples from the United States and Canada because of the occurrence of two clades of haplotypes (4.8% sequence divergence) with differing geographic distributions. One clade was predominant along the Atlantic Coast and the second in the south-central United States. The two clades co-occurred from the central Gulf Coast to the Upper Midwest, and across Canada to the Pacific. Nucleotide diversity was greatest where the clades overlapped in occurrence; mismatch distributions possessed the signatures of population expansion from the southern and eastern states to northern and western locations. These results suggest two Pleistocene refugia for northern populations of Barred Owls. Diversity within populations and divergence between haplotype clades varied by an order of magnitude among the three mitochondrial genes, but each recovered the overall phylogeographic pattern. The nuclear sequences showed much less variation and differentiation.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".