Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-18-2020

Department

College of Forest Resources and Environmental Science

Abstract

Although Northern red oak (Quercus rubra L.) is the most important introduced deciduous tree species in Germany, only little is known about its genetic variation. For the frst time, we describe patterns of neutral and potentially adaptive nuclear genetic variation in Northern red oak stands across Germany. For this purpose, 792 trees were genotyped including 611 trees from 12 stands in Germany of unknown origin and 181 trees from four populations within the natural distribution area in North America. Our marker set included 12 potentially adaptive (expressed sequence tag-derived simple sequence repeat=EST SSR) and 8 putatively selectively neutral nuclear microsatellite (nSSR) markers. Our results showed that German stands retain comparatively high levels of genetic variation at both EST-SSRs and nSSRs, but are more similar to each other than to North American populations. These fndings are in agreement with earlier chloroplast DNA analyses which suggested that German populations originated from a limited geographic area in North America. The comparison between potentially adaptive and neutral microsatellite markers did not reveal diferences in the analyzed diversity and diferentiation measures for most markers. However, locus FIR013 was identifed as a potential outlier locus. Due to the absence of signatures of selection in German stands, we suggest that introduced populations were established with material from provenances that were adapted to environmental conditions similar to those in Germany. However, we analyzed only a limited number of loci which are unlikely to be representative of adaptive genetic diferences among German stands. Our results suggest that the apparent introduction from a limited geographic range in North America may go along with a reduced adaptive potential.

Publisher's Statement

© The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Publisher’s version of record: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10342-019-01256-5

Publication Title

European Journal of Forest Research

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Version

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