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.通过生态位模型（Ecological Niche Modeling, ENM）估算得到的物种地理范围变化回溯预测结果，已与系统发育地理学格局相结合，由此可推断驱动种群分化与遗传变异的过往过程。然而近年来诸多研究表明，生态位模型所估算的生境适宜性图谱或许与物种丰度存在关联，这为利用生境适宜性推断种群动态及遗传变异相关过程提供了可能。在上述两类研究场景中，学界讨论的核心问题之一在于：生态位模型与气候模型的不同方法间往往存在显著差异，这为相关推断带来了不确定性。本研究针对巴西中部塞拉多（Cerrado）地区特有且广布的树种Dipteryx alata的25个种群，基于多套生态位模型分析了杂合度与生境适宜性之间的关联。本研究提出一种新方法，可基于随机生成的生态位模型集合生成相关性的统计分布，该分布的置信区间可反映不同属性模型的选择如何影响目标相关性（即杂合度与适宜性间的关联）的检测能力。同时，该方法可用于探究何种特定的生态位模型集合，能更精准地反映生境适宜性与杂合度间的关联。本研究讨论了在选择地理分布建模方法或气候数据集时需保持谨慎，但本文提出的新方法为评估模型集合检测目标模式的能力提供了一种保守可靠的途径。