The importance of marginal population hotspots of cold‐adapted species for research on climate change and conservation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Areas hosting hotspots of low‐latitude marginal populations of cold‐adapted plant species could be key areas for understanding geographical attributes that result in refugia during climatic shifts as well as the conservation of genetic diversity in the face of climate change. Low‐latitude populations of cold‐adapted plants are important because they may harbour the combination of alleles that foster persistence in a warmer climate. Consequently, identification of areas where arctic‐alpine, circumpolar and circumboreal species reach the low‐latitude ends of their distribution will present a unique opportunity to uncover processes that shaped current biogeographical patterns, as well as prepare for future scenarios. Here, we identify 35 main marginal population hotspots (19 and 16 areas in North America and Europe, respectively) of 183 plant taxa. These hotspots represent areas where southern marginal populations of cold‐adapted species co‐occur. The identification of hotspots was based on geographic overlap of southernmost locations of the target species, in a 50 × 50 km grid. With a threshold of two species in a single grid cell or in two contiguous cells, the analysis revealed that hotspots are in most cases located in the southern portion of major mountain chains. However, hotspots also occur in lowland areas at high latitudes (Fennoscandia, Alaska, Hudson Bay) which do not necessarily correspond to known cold‐ or warm‐stage refugia (e.g. Alps). Rockies and Sierra Nevada both in California and Spain, Apennines, and the southern Scandes, maintain their hotspot status even with more stringent cut‐off thresholds (>3 and >5 species per cell group). From a conservation point of view, our analysis reveals that only a small portion of the hotspots are currently included within protected areas. We discuss the importance of marginal population hotspots to future research on climate change and, finally, outline how conservation strategies can capitalize on the knowledge gained from studying climate change effects on cold‐adapted plants.
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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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".