World Conference on Natural Resource Modeling

Genetically Informed Models for Assisted Migration and Climate Change

High Country Conference Center

The role of genetics in restoration has largely revolved around the mantra of restoring with local genotypes. However, anthropogenic impacts on the planet have largely rendered this policy as inadequate at best and damaging at worst. Because of rapid environmental change, plants that are locally adapted today are likely to be locally maladapted to tomorrow’s environments. Thus, in regions of rapid change such as the American Southwest, local populations are likely to lack sufficient genetic variation to adapt to these new environments and to have inadequate dispersal abilities to move fast enough to keep up with the changes. Thus, it is important to identify the levels of local adaptation, especially for species with widespread distributions that span diverse environments. Our findings demonstrate both regional levels of adaptation associated with "ecoregions" and local levels of adaptation associated with specific sites (e.g., temperature, competitors). Depending on the level of local adaptation, we argue that ecoregions and populations should be modeled as if they were species. Utilizing a genetics-based approach can mean the difference between restoration success and failure, and is important to incorporate into models to identify genotypes and populations for both current and future climates. Key to this approach is the use of field trials embedded in lands to be restored such as the Southwest Experimental Garden Array (http://www.sega.nau.edu) that provide the infrastructure to incorporate genetics into models and to validate model approaches.