A strategy for identifying introduced provenances and translocations

Abstract

Native species of oak in Britain have been of great importance in our history for their many uses, and have thus been subject to management and planting by man for centuries. Following events such as the Enclosure Acts of the late eighteenth century and the Napoleonic wars, many oaks would have been planted. Translocations and introductions of foreign genotypes were greatly encouraged by early landscape gardeners such as Capability Brown. Britain must, therefore be a mosaic of native and non-native oaks. A major problem arises when we try to identify non-native trees. Due to their long life-cycle, oaks are of necessity both phenotypically plastic and genetically very variable and it has been virtually impossible to discriminate between native and non-native forms using traditional methods. The advent of new molecular genetic techniques however, now allows us to identify DNA markers that can distinguish between such forms. The geographic patterns for two chloroplast DNA markers will be presented. One clearly differentiates between oaks from eastern Europe versus western Europe and can be used to identify translocations of eastern European oaks into Britain and western Europe. The second identifies genotypes native to East Anglia and can be used to recognize translocations into and out of East Anglia.