Syntrichia ruralis is a cosmopolitan moss that occupies steep environmental gradients. In arid to semi-arid regions of the world it is a key component of biological soil crusts, which are fundamental to healthy dryland ecosystem processes. As such, S. ruralis has attracted the attention of conservationists seeking to restore degraded biological soil crust communities and their associated vascular flora. Here, we generate genomic data for S. ruralis populations that span climatic gradients across the Colorado Plateau of the southwestern USA to investigate the contributions of neutral and deterministic processes to the partitioning of genomic structure. Although S. ruralis appears to be highly dispersible, geographic proximity significantly predicts genomic similarity. In addition, even when taking into account apparently high migration rates among populations and spatial autocorrelation of allele frequencies, some genomic variation is explained by environmental gradients correlated with elevation and latitude. Consequently, efforts to restore dryland ecosystems by establishing S. ruralis as a foundation should include strategies to ensure that propagule sources of this moss are environmentally stratified and targeted to the current/future climates of restoration sites.

pyrad parametersThese are the parameters used to demultiplex and process the data in pyrad.params.txtR functions to filter a vcfThese functions can be used to filter a vcf file. They can remove loci that have a given amount missing data, remove individuals that have a given amount of missing data, remove individuals by name, and create histograms either of missing data per locus or individuals. Finally, once data are filtered, there is a function to write a structure output file.vcf_functions.RMoss dataThese are the data used is analyses, recorded in a structure formatted file. There are 81 individuals and 1678 loci, with up to 60% missing data per locus.moss.stru