DOI: 10.5061/dryad.7tq37
title: Data from: Relationships between adaptive and neutral genetic diversity and ecological structure and function: a meta-analysis

description: 1. Understanding the effects of intraspecific genetic diversity on the
 structure and functioning of ecological communities is a fundamentally
 important part of evolutionary ecology and may also have conservation
 relevance in identifying the situations in which genetic diversity
 coincides with species-level diversity. 2. Early studies within this field
 documented positive relationships between genetic diversity and ecological
 structure, but recent studies have challenged these findings. Conceptual
 synthesis has been hampered because studies have used different measures
 of intraspecific variation (phenotypically adaptive vs. neutral) and have
 considered different measures of ecological structure in different
 ecological and spatial contexts. The aim of this study is to strengthen
 conceptual understanding by providing an empirical synthesis quantifying
 the relationship between genetic diversity and ecological structure. 3.
 Here, I present a meta-analysis of the relationship between genetic
 diversity within plant populations and the structure and functioning of
 associated ecological communities (including 423 effect sizes from 70
 studies). I used Bayesian meta-analyses to examine (i) the strength and
 direction of this relationship, (ii) the extent to which phenotypically
 adaptive and neutral (molecular) measures of diversity differ in their
 association with ecological structure and (iii) variation in outcomes
 among different measures of ecological structure and in different
 ecological contexts. 4. Effect sizes measuring the relationship between
 adaptive diversity (genotypic richness) and both community- and
 ecosystem-level ecological responses were small, but significantly
 positive. These associations were supported by genetic effects on species
 richness and productivity, respectively. 4. There was no overall
 association between neutral genetic diversity and measures of ecological
 structure, but a positive correlation was observed under a limited set of
 demographic conditions. These results suggest that adaptive and neutral
 genetic diversity should not be treated as ecologically equivalent
 measures of intraspecific variation. 5. Synthesis. This study advances the
 debate over whether relationships between genetic diversity and ecological
 structure are either simply positive or negative, by showing how the
 strength and direction of these relationships changes with different
 measures of diversity and in different ecological contexts. The results
 provide a solid foundation for assessing when and where an expanded
 synthesis between ecology and genetics will be most fruitful.
description: Community-genetic effect
 size estimates and predictor variablesThis file contains
 effect sizes describing the relationship between population-level genetic
 diversity in plant species and measures of the structure and functioning
 of associated communities and ecosystems. Each effect size is accompanied
 by a measurement error variance estimate describing the precision of the
 corresponding effect size. The remaining data in these tables comprise
 sources of heterogeneity (predictor variables) used in the meta-analyses,
 and other descriptive information relating to the studies used in the
 review. There are two effect size datasets, one for adaptive (genotypic)
 measures of genetic diversity (sheet "d"), and one for neutral
 molecular measures of genetic diversity (sheet
 "z(r)").Whitlock_2014_JEcol_Effect_Size_Data.xlsx