Individual fitness is decoupled from coarse‐scale probability of occurrence in North American trees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Habitat suitability estimated with probability of occurrence in species distribution models (SDMs) is used in conservation to identify geographic areas that are most likely to harbor individuals of interest. In theory, probability of occurrence is coupled with individual fitness so that individuals have higher fitness at the centre of their species environmental niche than at the edges, which we here define as ‘fitness‐centre' hypothesis. However, such relationship is uncertain and has been rarely tested across multiple species. Here, we quantified the relationship between coarse‐scale probability of occurrence projected with SDMs and individual fitness in 66 tree species native of North America. We used 1) field data of individuals' growth rate (height and diameter standardized by age) available from the United States Forest Inventory Analysis plots; and 2) common garden data collected from 23 studies reporting individual growth rate, survival, height and diameter of individuals originated from different provenances in United States and Canada. We show ‘fitness–centre' relationships are rare, with only 12% and 11% of cases showing a significant positive correlation for field and common garden data, respectively. Furthermore, we found the ‘fitness–centre' relationship is not affected by the precision of the SDMs and it does not depend upon dispersal ability and climatic breath of the species. Thus, although the ‘fitness–centre' relationship is supported by theory, it does not hold true in nearly any species. Because individual fitness plays a relevant role in buffering local extinction and range contraction following climatic changes and biotic invasions, our results encourage conservationists not to assume the ‘fitness–centre' relationship when modelling species distribution.
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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) | 0.027 | 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".