Refining the distribution and confirming the phylogenetic relationship of the endangered landlocked harbour seal <i>Phoca vitulina mellonae</i> using environmental DNA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The endangered landlocked subspecies of harbour seal Phoca vitulina mellonae, composed of 50–600 individuals, inhabits a wide subarctic lake ecosystem of 700 km 2 in Canada. Its critical habitat was identified and is protected under Canada’s Species at Risk Act. Since 2019, environmental DNA (eDNA) detections are used to increase the subspecies surveying capacity. A probe-based qPCR assay and a metabarcoding assay were developed to enable a sensitive occurrence survey and a mitochondrial DNA diversity survey, respectively. Repeated temporal or spatial eDNA detections with the qPCR assay suggested the subspecies occurrence in waterbodies inside but also outside the critical habitat. Our results also showed that eDNA copy numbers estimated with the qPCR assay are affected by the sampling month and the water volume, and that they correlate negatively with distances from seals. Haplotypes obtained from the metabarcoding assay confirmed the subspecies’ distinct clade in P. vitulina’s global diversity. The network of samplers and the eDNA detection results underscore the role of eDNA survey in improving endangered marine mammal distribution characterization in areas with limited accessibility.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".