Genetic structure and dispersal in plant populations

Abstract: This thesis focuses on the spatial structure and methods to identify spatial structure in plants.Methods that investigate genetic structure can mainly be divided into equilibrium methods that reveal summed dispersal over many generations, and cluster methods, that reveal more recent dispersal events. Depending on the spatial level, local or global, suitable methods are different.The thesis consists of four papers.The first explores the spatial genetic structure in two epiphytic bryophytes that have different dispersal strategies (Orthotrichum speciosum and O. obtusifolium) using three different approaches based on pairwise kinship coefficients assessed from AFLP data. The spatial kinship structure was detected with both autocorrelation analysis and generalized additive models, but linear regression failed to detect any structure in O. speciosum.In the second paper the spatial genetic structure in marginal populations of the forest tree Quercus robur is investigated at both local and regional scales. At the local scale, dispersal kernels as estimated using maximum likelihood parentage methods showed to be comparable to results acquired in central located populations. At the regional scale the degree of isolation at the margin of the distribution is shown.The third paper compares a number of sibship clustering methods. It was found that the performances of the sibship reconstruction algorithms are strongly dependent on fulfilling the assumptions of the model and that using an overly simple model produced very unreliable results. The amount of information included in the model affected the results; models including all the available information outperformed the models using only a subset of the information.In the last paper we show that the number of clusters as estimated by the software Structurama depends on sample size. At high number of subpopulations, the estimated number of clusters tends to be grossly underestimated when the number of sampled individuals per subpopulation is low.