Populations restored using regional seed are genetically diverse and similar to natural populations in the region

Ecological restoration and plant re-introductions aim to create plant populations that are genetically similar to natural populations to preserve the regional gene pool, yet genetically diverse to allow adaptation to a changing environment. For this purpose, seeds for restoration are increasingly sourced from multiple populations in the target region. However, it has only rarely been tested whether using regional seed indeed leads to genetically diverse restored populations which are genetically similar to natural populations.
We used single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers to investigate genetic diversity within and differentiation among populations of Centaurea jacea and Betonica officinalis on restored and natural meadows in the White Carpathians, Czech Republic. The restoration took place 20 years ago using regional seeds propagated from a mix of multiple regional source populations. We included original regional seeds in our analysis to compare the restored populations with th..., Please refer to the methods section and supplementary information of:
Höfner, J., Klein-Raufhake, T., Lampei, C., Mudrak, O., Bucharova, A. and Durka, A. (2021) ‘Populations restored using regional seed are genetically diverse and similar to natural populations in the region’, accepted in Journal of Applied Ecology, These .vcf files represent the stage after filtering with 'vcftools' and tools from the 'vcflib' library and before import into R. These vcfs are derived from the raw sequencing data available on EMBL's European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) under accession number PRJEB45358 (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB45358) and are thought to facilitate work with this data set.