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Scots pine is an ecologically and economically important UK native species. As well as substantial planted forests (roughly 10 times the area of remnant native woodland), there are 81 recognised old-growth native Scots pinewoods – the only remaining UK habitat with a continuous history going back to the postglacial colonisation. Recent work has demonstrated local adaptation to environmental variation in the UK native population. However neutral genetic diversity is high, pollen dispersal distances are long and population structure very low, suggesting that local adaptation results from local divergent selection acting on a gene pool common to all populations. This is an ideal scenario within which to pursue genetic signatures of selection, as searches for markers related to traits are unconfounded by population structure; furthermore, the rapid decay of linkage disequilibrium typical of the pine genome means that positive identifications are likely to be very close to or within the relevant gene. To pursue the genetic basis of these adaptive patterns, a database of genomic variation has been established, which included 164,784 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in expressed genes, some involved in traits relevant to pest and pathogen resistance.

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