Relationships between adaptive and neutral genetic diversity and ecological structure and function: a meta-analysis

1. Understanding the effects of intraspecific genetic diversity on the structure and functioning of ecological communities is a fundamentally important part of evolutionary ecology and may also have conservation relevance in identifying the situations in which genetic diversity coincides with species-level diversity. 2. Early studies within this field documented positive relationships between genetic diversity and ecological structure, but recent studies have challenged these findings. Conceptual synthesis has been hampered because studies have used different measures of intraspecific variation (phenotypically adaptive vs. neutral) and have considered different measures of ecological structure in different ecological and spatial contexts. The aim of this study is to strengthen conceptual understanding by providing an empirical synthesis quantifying the relationship between genetic diversity and ecological structure. 3. Here, I present a meta-analysis of the relationship between genetic ...