Latitudinal limit not a cold limit: Cold temperatures do not constrain an endangered tree species at its northern edge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Aim A strong influence of climate on species’ range is often assumed, and forms the basis for projecting many future range shifts with changing climate. Particularly at poleward latitudinal or elevational edges, abiotic conditions are thought to play a major role in limiting distributions. We estimated the roles of climate and landscape features in shaping habitat at the northern distributional edge of a critically threatened mountain tree species. Location British Columbia and Alberta, Canada. Taxon Pinus albicaulis (Engelm.) Methods We used a hierarchical Bayesian model (HBM) to combine multiple scales, sources, qualities and types of species data. We jointly examined the climate influence on occupancy across scales, and on juvenile and adult abundance to quantify habitat quality at two life history stages. Results We found that cold temperature was the strongest predictor of whitebark pine occurrence at regional scales, with colder areas being better (i.e. the sign was negative). Occupancy at local scales was best predicted by low growing degree‐days and declining precipitation as snow. These relationships with occupancy across scales indicate that suitable climatic and topographic habitats currently exist beyond the northern edge of whitebark pine's current range. We found high adult abundance was predicted in sunny, cool habitats with little climatic drought, whereas high juvenile densities were associated with higher precipitation as snow and more climatic drought. Main conclusions The negative relationship to temperature and the ample suitable habitats predicted to exist poleward of the current species’ range limit indicates whitebark pine is not limited by cold temperatures. We suggest that not all species’ ranges are cold limited at high latitudes or elevations. For whitebark pine this means warming temperatures may not directly result in a northern range expansion as a result of warming habitat.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.014 | 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".