Climate change reduces genetic diversity of Canada lynx at the trailing range edge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Shifts in species distributions due to environmental change may affect the spatial pattern of genetic structure within a species' range, including possible changes to the adaptive potential of populations. We investigated spatial patterns of neutral genetic diversity and differentiation at the southern edge of the Canada lynx Lynx canadensis distribution in Ontario, Canada. We analyzed provincial fur harvest records (1972–2010) and collected and genotyped lynx pelt samples (2007–2009) from 702 lynx at 14 microsatellite loci. We show that the southern range boundary of lynx in central Canada has contracted northward by > 175 km since the 1970s, and that high winter temperature, low snow depth, and low proportion of suitable habitat are strongly correlated with low neutral genetic diversity and high genetic differentiation at the trailing range edge. Our work tests fundamental ideas about species range limits and demonstrates that environmental conditions can have a marked influence on neutral genetic structure. Our results suggest that changes in environmental conditions will result in further loss of genetic diversity and possibly reduce adaptive potential in southern peripheral lynx populations.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".