Morphological variation in subalpine fir and its relationship to balsam fir in western Canada and the United States / by C. Lynn Palmer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To help clarify the taxonomy of the two closely related North American firs \nsubalpine fir {Abies lasiocarpa (Hook.) Nutt.) and balsam fir {Abies balsamea \n(L.) Mill.) in western Canada and the United States, 10 populations of \nsubalpine fir from Yukon Territory, northern British Columbia, and Alaska were \ncompared on the basis of morphological traits to fir populations from \nWashington to northern Ontario. Principal components and discriminant \nanalyses were carried out separately on cone and needle data for various \nsubsets of these populations. Multiple regression analysis and analyses of \nvariance were used to investigate which evolutionary processes may have \nbeen important in the recent development of subalpine fir at its northern \nextreme. The regression analyses and analyses of variance suggest that \nvariation is expressed primarily within populations, throughout a single large \ngenepool at the northern extreme of subalpine fir's range, and that selection \ndue to local environmental pressures has produced the existing morphological \nvariation among populations. The multivariate analyses of cone and needle \ndata produced different results for several of the population subsets, indicating \nthat vegetative and sexual features of these firs respond to different selection \npressures at the various sites. Although the results are not entirely consistent, \nthe combined cone and needle data indicate that 1) north coastal British \nColumbia and interior Rocky Mountain populations of subalpine fir are \ngenerally distinct with the exception of a Vancouver Island population; 2) \nnorthern subalpine fir populations exhibit an affinity to interior populations and \nare very distinct from coastal populations. Additional geographic trends are 1) \ntwo Washington Cascades subalpine fir populations are distinct from all other \npopulations in needle morphology, but one of these populations (Mount Baker) \nis similar to the interior populations in cone morphology: 2) all balsam fir \npopulations are indistinguishable from interior subalpine fir populations on the \nbasis of needle morphology, but well-differentiated from these and coastal \npopulations in cone morphology. These results support 1) continued \nrecognition of subalpine and balsam fir as separate species and 2) recognition \nof coastal and interior subalpine fir as separate taxa, perhaps at varietal rank. \nThe present results refute the theory that subalpine fir survived the Wisconsin \nglaciation in one or more northern refugia. Rather, the close affinity between \nnorthern and interior subalpine fir populations suggests that they originated \nfrom a common Rocky Mountain refugium.
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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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".