Native or non‐native? Historical biogeography of an emergent forest pest, <i>Matsucoccus macrocicatrices</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Aim A historically benign insect herbivore, Matsucoccus macrocicatrices , has recently been linked to dieback and mortality of eastern white pine ( Pinus strobus L.). Previous reports indicated that its native range was restricted to New England, USA and southeastern Canada. Now, the insect occurs throughout an area extending from the putative native range, southward to Georgia, and westward to Wisconsin. Our goal was to evaluate whether its current distribution was due to recent introductions consistent with invasion processes. We considered two hypotheses: (a) if recent expansion into adventive regions occurred, those populations would have reduced genetic diversity due to founder effect(s); alternatively (b) if M. macrocicatrices is native and historically co‐occurred with its host tree throughout the North American range, then populations would have greater overall genetic diversity and a population structure indicative of past biogeographical influences. Location Eastern North America. Methods We developed nine M. macrocicatrices ‐specific microsatellite markers de novo and genotyped 390 individuals from 22 populations sampled across the range of eastern white pine in the USA. We assessed genetic variability, relatedness, and population structure. Results There were no signatures of founder effects. The only differences in genetic diversity occurred latitudinally, where the number of rare alleles and observed heterozygosity was highest in the southern range extent. Analyses of population structure indicated three distinct genetic clusters separated by the Great Lakes and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Main Conclusions The seemingly sudden ecological shift from benign herbivore to significant pest led us to suspect that M. macrocicatrices was non‐native. However, our findings suggest that this insect is native and has likely co‐occurred with its host tree since the last glacial maximum. Our study demonstrates the importance of historical biogeographical reconstruction to inform how to approach an emergent pest.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".