TY - JOUR T1 - Heritable and climatic sources of variation in juvenile tree growth in an Austrian common garden experiment of Central European Norway spruce populations JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/2022.01.10.475611 SP - 2022.01.10.475611 AU - Laura Morales AU - Kelly Swarts Y1 - 2022/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/01/12/2022.01.10.475611.abstract N2 - 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. ER -