Data from: Correlation between genetic diversity and environmental suitability: taking uncertainty from ecological niche models into account

The hindcast of shifts in the geographical ranges of species estimated by Ecological Niche Modeling (ENM) has been coupled with phylogeographical patterns, allowing inference of past processes driving population differentiation and genetic variability. However, more recently some studies suggested that maps of environmental suitability estimated by ENMs may be correlated to species’ abundance, raising the possibility to use environmental suitability to infer processes related to demographic dynamics of populations and genetic variability. In both cases, one of the main issues discussed is that a wide variation among methods for ENMs and climatic models usually appear, creating uncertainty in the inferences. Here we analyzed the relationship between heterozygosity and environmental suitability from multiple ENMs for 25 populations estimated for Dipteryx alata, a widely distributed tree species endemic to the Cerrado region of Central Brazil. We propose a new approach to generate an statistical distribution of correlations under randomly generated ensembles of ENMs, and the confidence interval of such distribution indicates how the selection of models with different properties affects the ability to detect the correlation of interest (i.e., the correlation between He and suitability). At the same time, the approach allows to explore which particular ensembles of ENMs produce better results for the association between environmental suitability and He. We discuss that caution is necessary when choosing a method or a climatic dataset for modeling geographic distributions, but the new approach proposed here provides a conservative way to evaluate the ability of ensembles in detect patterns of interest.