Environmental marginality and geographic range limits: a case study with <i>Arabidopsis lyrata</i> ssp. <i>lyrata</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Understanding the factors that govern the distribution of species is a central goal of evolutionary ecology. It is commonly assumed that geographic range limits reflect ecological niche limits and that species experience increasingly marginal conditions towards the edge of their ranges. Using spatial data and ecological niche models we tested these hypotheses in Arabidopsis lyrata . Specifically, we asked whether range limits coincide with predicted niche limits in this system and whether the suitability of sites declines towards the edge of the species’ range in North America. We further explored patterns of environmental change towards the edge of the range and asked whether genome‐wide patterns of genetic diversity decline with increasing peripherality and environmental marginality. Our results suggest that latitudinal range limits coincide with niche limits. Populations experienced increasingly marginal environments towards these limits – though patterns of environmental change were more complex than most theoretical models for range limits assume. Genomic diversity declined towards the edge of the species’ range and with increasing distance from the estimated centre of the species’ niche in environmental space, but not with the suitability of sites based on niche model predictions. Thus while latitudinal range limits in this system are broadly associated with niche limits, the link between environmental conditions and genetic diversity (and thus the adaptive potential of populations) is less clear.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".