The boreal biome represents approximately one third of the world's forested area and plays an important role in global biogeochemical and energy cycles. Numerous studies in boreal Alaska have concluded that growth of black and white spruce is declining as a result of temperature‐induced drought stress. The combined evidence of declining spruce growth and changes in the fire regime that favor establishment of deciduous tree spe...

Begonia is one of the largest angiosperm genera, containing over 1500 species. Some aspects of the distribution of biodiversity in the genus, such as the geographical restrictions of monophyletic groups, the rarity and morphological variability of widespread species, and a preponderance of narrow endemics, suggest that restricted gene flow may have been a factor in the formation of so many species. In order to investigate whet...

The early genetic effects of habitat degradation were investigated in the critically endangered conifer Araucaria nemorosa . This species occurs in New Caledonia, a global biodiversity hotspot where the world's greatest concentration of endemic conifer species coincides with an extremely high level of habitat destruction due to fire and mining. Using seven microsatellite loci, estimates were made of genetic marker variation, i...

To examine the performance and information content of different marker systems, comparative assessment of population genetic diversity was undertaken in nine populations of Athyrium distentifolium using nine genomic and 10 expressed sequence tag (EST) microsatellite (SSR) loci, and 265 amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) loci from two primer combinations. In range‐wide comparisons (European vs. North American populat...

Agroforestry ecosystems may be an important resource for conservation and sustainable use of tropical trees, but little is known of the genetic diversity they contain. Inga edulis , a widespread indigenous fruit tree in South America, is used as a model to assess the maintenance of genetic diversity in five planted vs. five natural stands in the Peruvian Amazon. Analysis of five SSR (simple sequence repeat) loci indicated lowe...

The attributes of codominance, reproducibility and high resolution have all contributed towards the current popularity of nuclear microsatellites as genetic markers in molecular ecological studies. One of their major drawbacks, however, is the development phase required to obtain working primers for a given study species. To facilitate project planning, we have reviewed the literature to quantify the workload involved in isola...

The genus Epipactis contains a problematical complex of autogamous taxa among which species limits are difficult to define. Different authors have treated these plants in different ways, some recognizing the different taxa as distinct species, others considering them as minor intraspecific variants. These contrasting treatments have a direct impact on the conservation resources and status such plants command; ‘endemic orchid s...

Retrophyllum is a genus in the Podocarpaceae consisting of five species with a disjunct distribution in the Southern Hemisphere. Support for the monophyly of the genus, and its sister group relationship to an Afrocarpus‐Nageia clade, was obtained from trn L‐F sequences. Within Retrophyllum, the Melanesian species (R. minus, R. comptonii, R. vitiense) formed a monophyletic group, sister to the South American species R. rospigli...

Random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPDs) and inter‐simple sequence repeats (inter‐SSRs) have been used to study clonal growth and hybridization in some non‐native, gynodioecious, invasive weeds from the genus Fallopia (Polygonaceae). At the study site (the River Kelvin, Glasgow, UK) a single genotype of Japanese knotweed ( Fallopia japonica ) was detected, consistent with all the individuals sampled being ramets of a single cl...