In southeast China there is a puzzle. Pseudotaxus chienii lives as a relict, a plant that used to have a much wider geographic range. Now it’s limited to comparatively few locations. This is common for many plants that...
Salix herbacea, as other arctic-alpine species, likely found a refuge from the Ice Age in the Apennines. As the climate changed around them, the trees survived in a fragmenting population. This fragmentation has genetic...
Plant populations continually change over space and time. Many factors contribute to this differentiation with some resulting in evolutionary change. Unravelling the relative importance of ecological and genetic...
Orchids have minute seeds and can disperse over long distances. Hedrén et al. use genetic markers to track how the marsh orchid Dactylorhiza majalis ssp. lapponica (Orchidaceae) colonised...
Many species exist on isolated habitats connected by dispersal of individuals. The evolutionary dynamics between two interacting species can be strongly influenced by the difference in mobility. Using highly variable...
Dispersal is crucial due to its direct impact on dynamics of a species’ distribution as well as having a role in shaping adaptive potential through gene flow. In plants forming scarce and small populations, knowledge...
Human-driven habitat fragmentation leads to spatial isolation of endangered plant species, increasing extinction risk. Understanding genetic variability and population structure of rare and isolated plant species is of...
Island organisms are generally understood to diverge through geographical (allopatric) speciation. This paradigm, however, might be too simplistic for continental islands that were connected with each other and/or the...
The underlying genetic causes of the switch to apomixes are not yet fully understood, but in Hypericum there is good evidence for the existence of ‘apomictic factors’.
Maintaining genetic integrity is essential for in situ and ex situ conservation of crop wild relative (CWR) species. However, introgression of crop alleles into CWR species/populations may change their genetic structure...
Wild olive (Olea europaea subsp. europaea var. sylvestris, aka oleaster) populations are subject to increasing fragmentation and size reduction. Beghè et al. employ microsatellite markers and apply paternity analysis to...