Environmental Drivers of Genetic Divergence in Two Corals From the Florida Keys.

ABSTRACT: Increasingly frequent marine heatwaves devastate coral reefs around the world, so there is great interest in finding warm-adapted coral populations that could be used as sources for assisted gene flow and restoration. Here, we evaluated the relative power of various environmental factors to explain coral genetic variation, suggestive of differential local adaptation to these factors, across the Florida Keys Reef Tract. We applied a machine learning population genomic method (RDAforest) to two coral species-the mustard hill coral Porites astreoides and the lettuce coral Agaricia agaricites-sampled from 65 sites covering the whole reef tract. Both species comprised three genetically distinct lineages distributed across depths in a remarkably similar way. Within these lineages,

SUBMITTER: Black KL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12206660 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature