Genomic analysis reveals population structure and guides conservation actions of the endangered plant, Pedicularis furbishiae (Orobanchaceae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Pedicularis furbishiae is a globally rare, hemiparasitic perennial restricted to dynamic riverbank habitats along the Wolastoq (Saint John) River in Maine, USA, and New Brunswick, Canada. The species now faces severe threats from habitat fragmentation, altered hydrology, and demographic collapse—particularly in New Brunswick, where several subpopulations have been recently extirpated and where recovery activities are being undertaken to protect the species from further decline. In this study, we assembled the first reference genome for P. furbishiae and conducted reduced-representation genotyping by sequencing (GBS) across 69 individuals sampled from all major subpopulations. Despite recovering a modest number of SNPs (152), we identified four genetically distinct populations: one in Maine with some subpopulation structure and three isolated subpopulations in New Brunswick. Genetic diversity was low overall, with elevated inbreeding coefficients in Grand Falls and Medford populations. All subpopulations contain private alleles, indicating the importance of conserving even the most demographically vulnerable sites. These findings support an integrated conservation strategy combining seed banking, ex situ propagation, and genetic rescue through controlled outcrossing among subpopulations, and provide a critical genomic baseline to inform the recovery of this imperiled species through population reinforcement and reintroduction across its range.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".