Spatio-temporal Functional Regression on Paleo-ecological Data

11 The influence of climate on biodiversity is an important ecological question. Vari12 ous theories try to link climate change to allelic richness and therefore to predict 13 the impact of global warming on genetic diversity. We model the relationship be14 tween genetic diversity in the European beech forests and curves of temperature 15 and precipitation reconstructed from pollen databases. Our model links the genetic 16 measure to the climate curves through a linear functional regression. The interac17 tion in climate variables is assumed to be bilinear. Since the data are georeferenced, 18 our methodology accounts for the spatial dependence among the observations. The 19 practical issues of these extensions are discussed. 20