Bryophyte Floristic and Genetic Diversity in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago with an emphasis on Victoria Island, Nunavut
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Polar environments are experiencing rapid change with global warming. A major component of the flora in this area are the bryophytes (mosses and liverworts), which provide critical ecosystem functions in food webs and habitat complexity. Extensive knowledge of bryophytes in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA) is currently lacking, which limits the ability to track changes consequence of climate change. To address this gap, my thesis focused on assessing three levels of biodiversity: species diversity (floristics) of southwestern Victoria Island (Chapter 2), species diversity of bryophytes on a small scale (3km radius) on Victoria Island (Chapter 3), as well as molecular diversity within Aulacomnium turgidum (Wahlenberg) Schwägrichen, an arctic-alpine moss, which occurs across the CAA (Chapter 4). Chapter 2 provides an assessment of bryophyte diversity from fieldwork in southern and southeastern Victoria Island and literature and herbarium records. Data based on quantitative, opportunistic, and floristic habitat sampling from 43 sites included 114 taxa from 828 field samples, including 71 taxa previously unrecorded for Victoria Island and one species previously undescribed. High beta diversity was observed from the 43 field sites and concluded to be due to the high proportion of rare taxa and wide range of microhabitats present. Gamma diversity for Victoria Island was enumerated from fieldwork, verified herbarium collections, and publications and resulted in 138 taxa. Chapter 3 focuses on bryophyte species diversity from a fine-scale (<3 km radius) quantitative assessment of 10 terrestrial communities across a dry-wet gradient. Ordination analyses were used to evaluate distribution, abundance and the potential environmental factors influencing the community composition. Distribution of dominant and common taxa was also described. Limited taxon overlap between sites was found, also resulting in high beta diversity at this scale of sampling. Barium was found to be the only significant environmental contributor to bryophyte community assemblage. Chapter 4 examines the intraspecific variation of the moss taxon, Aulacomnium turgidum, across its range with a focus on Canadian Arctic Archipelago populations. This chapter utilizes the genetic loci ITS, trnL-F, and atpB-rbcL. Aulacomnium turgidum exhibited high intraspecific variation in the nuclear region ITS, limited variation in the chloroplast region atpB-rbcL, and all exemplars had identical trnL-F sequences, with the exception of one. Phylogeographic structure of A. turgidum populations was generally lacking. However, one atpB-rbcL haplotype (Greenland and Baffin) was differentiated from western Canada and some North American and European populations, which could indicate an ancestral haplotype. No locus from single or combined analyses supported A. turgidum as a monophyletic taxon. Interspecific indel sharing and incongruence between loci indicate potential ancient hybridization and incomplete lineage sorting. This initial evaluation of bryophyte diversity for Victoria Island is based on species diversity at two spatial scales and genetic variation of a single species across its arctic range. The data generated in this thesis includes herbarium specimens and contributions to genetic databases (GenBank and BOLD) which provide a baseline assessment of bryophyte biodiversity. These data facilitate future bryophyte monitoring and research (e.g., taxon and community shifts, conservation of rare taxa, biogeographical patterns in the Arctic) in the context of climate change.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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".