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 as estimated by Ecological Niche Modeling (ENM) has been coupled with phylogeographical patterns, allowing the inference of past processes that drove population differentiation and genetic variability. However, more recently, some studies have suggested that maps of environmental suitability estimated by ENM may be correlated to species’ abundance, raising the possibility of using environmental suitability to infer processes related to population demographic dynamics and genetic variability. In both cases, one of the main problems is that there is a wide variation in ENM development methods and climatic models. In this study, we analyze the relationship between heterozygosity (He) and environmental suitability from multiple ENMs for 25 population estimates for Dipteryx alata, a widely distributed, endemic tree species of the Cerrado region of Central Brazil. We propose a new approach for generating a statistical distribution of correlations under randomly generated ENM. The confidence intervals from these distributions indicate how model selection with different properties affects the ability to detect a correlation of interest (e.g., the correlation between He and suitability). Additionally, our approach allows us to explore which particular ensemble of ENMs produces the better result for finding an association between environmental suitability and He. 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 to detect patterns of interest.

基于生态位模型（Ecological Niche Modeling，ENM）所估算的物种地理分布范围变化回溯分析，此前已与谱系生物地理学格局相结合，从而得以推断驱动种群分化与遗传变异的过往过程。然而近年来，已有研究表明，生态位模型所估算的环境适宜性图谱或与物种丰度存在相关性，这为利用环境适宜性推断种群动态遗传相关过程提供了可行方向。上述两类研究均面临一项核心挑战：生态位模型的构建方法与所用气候模型均存在显著差异。本研究针对巴西中部塞拉多（Cerrado）区域特有广布树种香二翅豆（Dipteryx alata）的25个种群估算数据集，分析了多组生态位模型得到的杂合度（He）与环境适宜性之间的关联关系。我们提出一种全新方法，可基于随机生成的生态位模型构建相关性统计分布。该分布对应的置信区间能够反映，具备不同特性的模型选择，会如何影响目标相关性（例如杂合度与适宜性间的相关性）的检测能力。此外，本方法可用于探索哪一类生态位模型集合在探寻环境适宜性与杂合度之间的关联时，能够获得更优的分析结果。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可为评估生态位模型集合检测目标格局的能力提供一种保守可靠的途径。