Environmental Variation Influences Genome Evolution in Hispaniolan Trunk Anoles (Anolis distichus)

Environmental variation often drives evolutionary processes like population differentiation, local adaptation and speciation. We used genome-scale data to investigate the contribution of environmental variation to evolution of the North Caribbean bark anole (Anolis distichus), a widespread common lizard that exhibits impressive phenotypic variation across varying habitats on the island of Hispaniola. We obtained new double-digest restriction-associated DNA sequence data (ddRADseq) from nearly 200 individuals and used 53 GIS data layers representing a range of environmental variables. We first asked how environmental variation has contributed to genome-wide differentiation across Hispaniola. We found that Hispaniola's three major mountain ranges contribute to deep genome-wide divergence and patterns of migration, that some deeply genomically divergent populations occupy significantly different environments, and that environmental variation is broadly capable of explaining more range-wide genomic differentiation than geographic distance alone. We then asked whether specific loci exhibit evidence of local adaptation to environmental variation using genotype-environment association (GEA) methods. We initially identified hundreds of loci broadly distributed across the genome that are significantly correlated with one or more environmental variables, but ultimately found that fewer than 100 of these candidate loci are shared across different GEA methods applied to our entire dataset, and that only 10 candidate loci are shared by independent analyses of two regional subsets of our dataset, suggesting parallel evolution is infrequent. Our study shows that abiotic environmental variation has played a critical role in explaining the evolution and diversity of a widespread and phenotypically diverse Caribbean anole species.