Conservation Genetic Analysis of Spotted Turtles (<i>Clemmys </i><i>guttata</i>) Across the Western Portion of Their Range
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Spotted Turtle (Clemmys guttata) populations are declining dramatically across their range primarily due to habitat alteration, fragmentation, and reduction. Fragmented habitats have the potential to affect a population’s genetic diversity and size through the direct loss of individuals and the reduction of gene flow. Understanding genetic variation in Spotted Turtles can provide insight into population dynamics, the geographic distribution of genetic variants, and conservation needs. I examined the genetic variation in Spotted Turtle populations across the western portion of their geographic range including localities in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and Ontario, Canada. Using blood samples collected during the 2022 and 2023 field seasons as well as previously collected tissues, I genotyped 611 individuals across 17 or more localities using 16 microsatellite loci. Five of 17 sites across the geographic extent of the sample suggested the presence of inbreeding (positive Fis values). Although the precision of estimates was low in most localities (10 of 17 with incalculable confidence intervals), the remaining localities in Ohio were estimated to have effective population sizes of < 20 individuals. Model-based and ordination-based clustering were conducted to assess population structure. Both types of clustering approaches identified four genetic clusters within the dataset. The two Illinois sites fell distinctly into their own cluster, whereas all other sites show a pattern of admixture. Despite these clustering results, incorporation of spatial information in principal component analysis (sPCA), shows that genetic composition gradually changes from west to east across the landscape, a pattern supported by isolation by distance using a Mantel test of the correlation between genetic and geographic distances. My results show that several Spotted Turtle populations have low levels of genetic variation and could benefit from augmentation. The observed pattern of isolation by distance 9 suggests that any translocations of turtles to support populations should be attempt to draw from viable populations that are in closer proximity.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".