Enhancement of climate‐related plant translocations by reinforcing populations with nearby genotypes

Assisted gene flow is used to increase the resilience of populations to climate change. Although the selection of genotypes used to reinforce populations is expected to have a significant impact on climate change vulnerability of target populations, the potential of nearby genotypes to increase climate resilience remains unexplored. With a common understory species, Primula elatior, we combined common garden experiments with conservation genomics to compare population reinforcement for climate adaptation with genotypes from southern France (southern) versus Belgium (regional) as sources for assisted gene flow. We used population genomic approaches to identify genetic markers associated with adaptation and investigated how these genomic signatures of adaptation changed from parents to offspring depending on the origin of the parents. Southern genotypes had the largest impact on the distribution of climate-associated genetic markers, but regional genotypes also increased adaptive potential, most likely due to microclimate differences between source and target populations. We argue that the importance of microscale environmental variation in boosting resilience to climate change deserves to be considered more frequently as a climate-oriented conservation strategy that has much less risk of outbreeding depression.