DISCUSSION
Our study identified putative patterns of climate adaptation in jarrah,
with several strong associations between candidate SNPs and climatic
gradients. The results provide support for our hypothesis of strong
patterns of local adaptation to climate across the distribution of
jarrah, although, contrary to our second hypothesis, we found adaptation
to both temperature and precipitation variables rather than primarily
with precipitation. As expected, annotation highlighted functional genes
associated with biological processes, some of which relate to abiotic
stress factors and provide good candidates for adaptations. Furthermore,
the landscape genomics modelling assessed the magnitude of allelic
turnover for candidate SNPs and highlighted temperature seasonality,
mean maximum temperature of the warmest month and precipitation of the
warmest quarter as explaining significantly more variation than other
climate drivers. These patterns indicate that adaptive variants are
independently sorting across the landscape, which is consistent with our
fourth hypothesis. We discuss the mechanisms for adaptation to climate
across complex landscape for forest trees, including a direct comparison
with a co-dominant co-occurring foundation species, before providing the
scientific basis for implementation of management and conservation
strategies to promote the resilience of foundation tree species.