Environmental Data Do Not Correlate With Plant Genetic Diversity in Alpine Ecosystems.

Genetic diversity is a fundamental asset for populations to adapt to changing environmental conditions, particularly under climate change. Although much attention has been paid to protecting taxonomic and ecological diversity, genetic diversity has often been overlooked in management and conservation plans due to the difficulty and costs of its evaluation. We expect an extraordinary impact of global warming on alpine habitats and species that urges us to prioritize the protection of genetic diversity. We analyzed the relationship between 48 environmental factors (climate, soil, and topography) and genetic diversity with AFLP data from 309 populations of 14 European alpine plant species. We used LASSO models and univariate linear regressions to investigate associations between genetic diversity and rarity values in populations as a function of environmental factors at sampling sites, and to identify the best environmental predictors. We found that among all factors, only a topographic descriptor associated with surface concavity and convexity (profile curvature, pcurv) had minimal but significant effects on heterozygosity and genetic rarity when combining all populations from all species (