Setting the limit: cold rather than hot temperatures limit intertidal distribution of a coastal foundation species
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Long-lasting restoration success of foundation species requires understanding their responses to climate change. For species with broad distributions, lower latitudes may serve as a proxy for future warming at higher latitudes. Such space-for-time substitutions are a powerful tool for developing climate change predictions for species distributed along steep elevational gradients. To understand climate resilience of a key coastal foundation species, we examined the upper elevational limit of the native Olympia oyster ( Ostrea lurida ) along its entire range at 26 sites spanning 21° latitude, from British Columbia to Baja California. Counter to our expectations, high air temperatures did not affect variation in the upper limit of Olympia oysters. Indeed, Olympia oysters extended high into the intertidal zone at the warmer southern sites, and shading did not influence the upper limit. Our models indicated instead that extreme low temperatures set the upper limit for Olympia oysters at higher latitudes. In contrast, neither the Pacific oyster ( Magallana gigas ), a co-occurring global invader, nor barnacles exhibited clear latitudinal patterns. These findings suggest that Olympia oysters and restoration projects aimed at supporting their recovery will be resilient to increased temperatures projected by climate change models. Our results also illustrate the importance of testing the assumption that species on steep elevational gradients are living close to their upper thermal limits and will be negatively impacted by warming; for this foundation species, the assumption was false. Latitudinal studies enhance understanding of species response to climate stressors and are key to the design of climate-resilient conservation strategies. • Heat sets upper elevation limits for many intertidal species, but not Olympia oysters. • At high latitudes, cold temperatures limit Olympia oysters to the low intertidal zone. • Olympia oysters' elevational distribution may expand at high latitudes with warming. • This coastal foundation species will likely be fairly resilient to climate change. • Latitudinal studies can test assumptions about impacts of predicted warming.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".