Abstract
Understanding and quantifying populations' adaptive genetic variation and their response to climate change are critical to reforestation's seed source selection, forest management decisions, and gene conservation. Landscape genomics combined with geographic and environmental information provide an opportunity to interrogate forest populations' genome‐wide variation for understanding the extent to which evolutionary forces shape past and contemporary populations' genetic structure, and identify those populations that may be most at risk under future climate change. Here, we used genotyping by sequencing to generate over 11,000 high‐quality variants from Platycladus orientalis range‐wide collection to evaluate its diversity and to predict genetic offset under future climate scenarios. Platycladus orientalis is a widespread conifer in China with significant ecological, timber, and medicinal values. We found population structure and evidences of isolation by environment, indicative of adaptation to local conditions. Gradient forest modeling identified temperature‐related variables as the most important environmental factors influencing genetic variation and predicted areas with higher risk under future climate change. This study provides an important reference for forest resource management and conservation for P. orientalis.
Highlights
The observed rapid pace of climate change is expected to profoundly influence species distribution and diversity, and is considered as one of the significant causes of biodiversity decline and/or loss in the century (Dawson, Jackson, House, Prentice, & Mace, 2011; Pacifici et al, 2015; Warren et al, 2013)
Understanding how forest trees respond to climate change aids efforts to predict species range shift and informs management issues related to conservation and reforestation
To estimate the degree to which genomic variation is influenced by environmental or geographic variables, we performed a series of redundancy analyses (RDAs) in the R package vegan (Oksanen et al, 2018)
Summary
The observed rapid pace of climate change is expected to profoundly influence species distribution and diversity, and is considered as one of the significant causes of biodiversity decline and/or loss in the century (Dawson, Jackson, House, Prentice, & Mace, 2011; Pacifici et al, 2015; Warren et al, 2013). KEYWORDS adaptation, climate change, genetic offset, genotyping by sequencing, Platycladus orientalis, population structure We further created a set of unlinked SNPs by keeping only one SNP per GBS fragment; this set consisted of 3,911 SNPs. To estimate the degree to which genomic variation is influenced by environmental or geographic variables, we performed a series of redundancy analyses (RDAs) in the R package vegan (Oksanen et al, 2018).
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