Endemic species have highly integrated phenotypes, environmental distributions and phenotype–environment relationships
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Aim Why are some species geographically restricted? Ecological explanations suggest that endemic species may have restricted distributions because limited phenotypic variability results in narrow niches. However, studying variability of traits independently may not fully explain the interactions within and between complex phenotypes and environments. Here, we hypothesize that endemic species are restricted to a narrow range of habitats due to strong phenotypic integration (i.e. strong correlations among traits), strong environmental integration (i.e. strong correlations among the environments occupied) and strong correlations among trait–environment combinations. Location The Kerguelen Islands, sub‐Antarctic. Methods We measured flowering phenology, multiple morphological characters, and species distribution along three abiotic environmental gradients (elevation, soil moisture and soil salinity) in 14 plant species whose distributions range from strictly endemic to cosmopolitan. Results We found that for individual species, trait means and variances were independent of endemism, but that endemics occupied higher and less variable microhabitats. However, phenotypic integration, environmental integration along the three gradients, and the strength of trait–environment correlations all increased with the level of species endemism. Main conclusions Higher levels of integration within and between phenotypes and environments are associated with more restricted geographical ranges in the species studied. In endemic species phenotypic integration may explain range contraction during the taxon cycle and reduce the ability to adapt to novel microhabitats formed as a result of environmental change.
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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) | 0.043 | 0.001 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".