PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Laura Morales
AU  - Kelly Swarts
TI  - Heritable and climatic sources of variation in juvenile tree growth in an Austrian common garden experiment of Central European Norway spruce populations
AID  - 10.1101/2022.01.10.475611
DP  - 2022 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2022.01.10.475611
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/01/12/2022.01.10.475611.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/01/12/2022.01.10.475611.full
AB  - We leveraged publicly available data on juvenile tree height of 299 Central European Norway spruce populations grown in a common garden experiment across 24 diverse trial locations in Austria and weather data from the trial locations and population provenances to parse the heritable and climatic components of tree height variation. Principal component analysis of geospatial and weather variables demonstrated high interannual variation among trial environments, largely driven by differences in precipitation, and separation of population provenances based on altitude, temperature, and snowfall. Tree height was highly heritable and genetic variation for tree height was strongly associated with climatic relationships among population provenances. Modeling the covariance between populations and trial environments based on climatic data increased the heritable signal for tree height.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.