Biodiversity, biogeography and life history of ground-dwelling spiders (Araneae) in the Yukon Territory, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Spiders (Arachnida: Araneae) are one of the most diverse and abundant taxa in the Arctic and are affected by fine scale changes in their environment, including temperature, precipitation, and habitat structure. This thesis describes research that occurred across the boreal forest tundra transition zone in the Yukon Territory, Canada. This study system provides an opportunity to test hypotheses about biogeographic patterns and determinants of diversity and life history of spiders in the north. There were four objectives of this research: first, to determine which environmental factors most influence spider assemblage structure (i.e., composition, richness, abundance) at a regional scale in the Arctic; second, to understand patterns of spider assemblages across latitudinal and elevational gradients; third, to understand relationships of life history traits (i.e., body size, body condition, fecundity, reproductive effort) and some of the factors (i.e., density, parasitism, developmental timing) that might influence these traits; and fourth, to determine the effects of elevation on life history traits (i.e., body size, fecundity) in the region. I employed the use of pitfall traps and visual surveys to collect ground-dwelling spiders across latitude and elevation at a regional scale spanning the boreal forest tundra transition zone. My results show that, at a regional extent, spatially structured changes in vegetation best explain the patterns of spider assemblage structure. Elevation has significant effects on spider composition, species richness and overall abundance, but species-specific responses differed along the gradient. For wolf spiders (Lycosidae), female body size best explained variation in fecundity and body condition was the best predictor for relative reproductive effort. I found evidence for egg size-number tradeoffs and very high incidence of parasitism in some populations (e.g., 52% of individual egg sacs) of the species studied. I found that body size (which is correlated with fecundity) varies with elevation, between the sexes and among species. This thesis provides quantitative data about the regional biogeography of arctic spider assemblages, as well as relationships between life history traits for northern wolf spiders. These data can also serve as a foundation upon which to develop and test hypotheses in the contexts of biodiversity, biogeography, life history and climate change in the Arctic.
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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 | 0.000 | 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".