%0 Journal Article %A Stewart L. Macdonald %A John Llewelyn %A Ben L. Phillips %T Using connectivity to identify climatic drivers of local adaptation %D 2017 %R 10.1101/145169 %J bioRxiv %P 145169 %X Despite being able to conclusively demonstrate local adaptation, we are still often unable to objectively determine the climatic drivers of local adaptation. Given the rapid rate of global change, understanding the climatic drivers of local adaptation is vital. Not only will this tell us which climate axes matter most to population fitness, but such knowledge is critical to inform management strategies such as translocation and targeted gene flow. Targeted gene flow, for example, requires knowledge of where in the landscape we can find populations with pre-adapted climate-relevant traits; we cannot find these populations if we do not know the dominant climatic drivers of local adaptation. While simple assessments of geographic trait variation are useful, geographic variation — and its associations with environment — may represent plastic, rather than evolved differences. Additionally, the vast number of environment–trait combinations makes it difficult to determine which aspects of the environment populations adapt to. Here we argue that by incorporating a measure of landscape connectivity as a proxy for gene flow, we can differentiate between environment–trait relationships that are under selection versus those that reflect phenotypic plasticity. By doing so, we can rapidly shorten the list of environment–trait combinations that may be of adaptive significance. We demonstrate this method using data on geographic trait variation in a lizard species from Australia's Wet Tropics rainforest.Significance Statement Despite 150 years of evolutionary research, we still do not have a good method for determining the climatic drivers of local adaptation. Having such a method is critical if we are to understand and mitigate the impact of climate change. Here we exploit the fact that local adaptation is eroded by gene flow to develop a new method for identifying the environmental drivers of local adaptation. Our method will allow workers around the world, for the first time (and often using existing datasets), to determine the climatic drivers of local adaptation in their system. As such, the method has powerful implications not only for pure evolutionary research, but also for management. %U https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2017/06/02/145169.full.pdf