Phylogenetic diversity of geometrid moths decreases with elevation in the tropical Andes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Species diversity of geometrid moths (Lepidoptera, Geometridae) has previously been shown to be extremely and constantly high along a continuously forested elevational gradient in the Andes of southern Ecuador. We analysed samples taken from 32 sites between 1999 and 2011 in northern Podocarpus National Park and adjacent areas from 1020 to 2916 m a.s.l. We conjecture that high elevation habitats were historically mostly colonised by species from lower elevations, and that environmental filtering (e.g. through host plant specificity or temperature tolerance) constrained colonisation from lower elevations, which would yield a pattern of elevationally decreasing phylogenetic diversity. We analysed elevational phylogenetic patterns by means of: 1) the nearest‐taxon index (NTI), 2) DNA barcode‐based terminal branch lengths (TBLs) from maximum‐likelihood phylogeny, 3) the subfamily composition of the local assemblages, and 4), the rarefied number of morphologically defined genera per site. We counted a total of 1445 species. NTI values significantly increased with elevation, both in a conventional and a rarefaction approach. TBLs decreased significantly with elevation. Subfamily composition profoundly changed with elevation, particularly expressed as an increased proportion of the subfamily Larentiinae and decreased fractions of Sterrhinae and Geometrinae. The number of genera in equally rarefied species resamples significantly decreased with elevation. We conclude that environmental filtering indeed contributed to an altitudinal decrease in moth phylodiversity, but these constraints prevented only relatively few clades from colonising high elevation habitats.
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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".