Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Colonization of vegetation-rich moraines and inference of multiple sources of colonization in the High Arctic for Salix arctica

  • Short Communication
  • Published:
Conservation Genetics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Vegetation-rich patches in the High Arctic may serve as a significant source for vegetation reconstruction in the climate changes. Diversity and colonization, however, of such potential source populations in the High Arctic has rarely been studied. We examined chloroplast sequence variation in Salix arctica, a key species in the Canadian High Arctic, from four adjacent glacial moraines of differing ages on Ellesmere Island, Canada, as well as two other populations located at the center and southern end of the species’ range. The estimated ages of the moraines varied from 35,000 to 250 years old. The older moraine populations showed higher within-population genetic variation compared with the other moraine populations, which is generally attributed to differences in establishment age associated with plant densities among moraines. The moraines with smaller plant density had lower genetic diversity and had no private haplotypes, indicating the local population size and genetic diversity may not be recovered within a few thousand years. This suggests seed dispersal at a local scale may be limited even in species with high velocity of seed dispersal, and that High Arctic vegetation-rich patches may serve as significant source populations for sustaining local genetic diversity. In addition, the three regions we observed comprised an evolutionarily distinct lineage and significant population differentiation. This implies multiple sources for the colonization during the most recent deglaciation, resulting in the current wide distribution. Local as well as range-wide processes of colonization would be essential to understand vegetation responses in High Arctic to the environmental changes.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1

References

  • Abbott RJ, Smith LC, Milne RI, Crawford RMM, Wolff K, Balfour J (2000) Molecular analysis of plant migration and refugia in the Arctic. Science 289:1343–1346

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Alsos IG, Alm T, Normand S, Brochmann C (2009) Past and future range shifts and loss of diversity in dwarf willow (Salix herbacea L.) inferred from genetics, fossils and modelling. Global Ecol Biogeogr 18:223–239

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Birks HH (2008) The late-quaternary history of Arctic and alpine plants. Plant Ecol Divers 1:135–146

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bliss LC, Gold WG (1994) The patterning of plant communities and edaphic factors along a high arctic coastline: implications for succession. Can J Bot 72:1095–1107

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brandelt HJ, Forster P, Sykes BC, Richards MB (1995) Mitochondrial portraits of human populations using median networks. Genetics 141:743–753

    Google Scholar 

  • Chapin FS III, Walker LR, Fastie CL (1994) Mechanisms of primary succession following deglaciation at Glacier Bay, Alaska. Ecol Bull 38:69–76

    Google Scholar 

  • Davis MB, Shaw RG (2001) Range shift and adaptive responses to quaternary climate changes. Science 292:673–679

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Doyle JJ, Doyle JL (1990) A rapid total DNA preparation procedure for fresh plant tissue. Focus 12:13–15

    Google Scholar 

  • DumolinLapegue S, Pemonge MH, Petit RJ (1997) An enlarged set of consensus primers for the study of organelle DNA in plants. Mol Ecol 6:393–397

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Dyke AS, Andrews JT, Clark PU, England JH, Miller GH, Shaw J et al (2002) The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum. Quat Sci Rev 21:9–31

    Google Scholar 

  • Ellison AM, Bank MS, Clinton BD, Colburn EA, Elliott K, Ford CR, Foster DR, Kloeppel BD, Knoepp JD, Lovett GM, Mohan J, Orwig DA, Rodenhouse NL, Sobczak WV, Stinson KA, Stone JK, Swan CM, Thompson J, Von Holle B, Webster JR (2005) Loss of foundation species: consequences for the structure and dynamics of forested ecosystems. Front Ecol Environ 3:479–486

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Excoffier L (2004) Patterns of DNA sequence diversity and genetic structure after a range expansion: lessons from the infinite-island model. Mol Ecol 13:853–864

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Fedorov VB, Stenseth NC (2002) Multiple glacial refugia in the North American Arctic: inference from phylogeography of the collared lemming (Dicrostonyx groenlandicus). Proc Royal Soc B-Biol Sci 269:2071–2077

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Freedman B, Svoboda J, Henry GHR (1994) Alexandra Fiord—an ecological oasis in the polar desert. In: Svoboda J, Freedman B (eds) Ecology of a polar oasis: Alexandra Fiord, Ellesmere, Island, Canada. Captus University Publications, Toronto

    Google Scholar 

  • Fu Y-X, Li W-H (1993) Statistical tests of neutrality of mutations. Genetics 133:693–709

    PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Harpending HC (1994) Signature of ancient population-growth in a low-resolution mitochondrial-DNA mismatch distribution. Hum Biol 66:591–600

    PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Hartl DL, Clark AG (2007) Principles of population genetics, 4th edn. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland

    Google Scholar 

  • Hijmans RJ, Cameron SE, Parra JL, Jones PG, Jarvis A (2005) Very high resolution interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas. Int J Climatol 25:1965–1978

    Google Scholar 

  • Horn HS, Nathan R, Kaplan SR (2001) Long-distance dispersal of tree seeds by wind. Ecol Res 16:877–885

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • King L (1981) Studies in glacial history of the area between Oobloyah Bay and Esayoo Bay, northern Ellesmere Island, N.W.T., Canada. In: Barsch D, King L (eds) Results of the Heidelberg Ellesmere Island expedition. Geographischen Instituts der Universta¨t Heidelberg, Heidelberg

    Google Scholar 

  • Larkin MA, Blackshields G, Brown NP, Chenna R, McGettigan PA, McWilliam H, Valentin F, Wallace IM, Wilm A, Lopez R, Thompson JD, Gibson TJ, Higgins DG (2007) Clustal W and clustal X version 2.0. Bioinformatics 23:2947–2948

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Librado P, Rozas J (2009) DnaSP v5: a software for comprehensive analysis of DNA polymorphism data. Bioinformatics 25:1451–1452

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Mori AS, Osono T, Uchida M, Kanda H (2008) Changes in the structure and heterogeneity of vegetation and microsite environments with the chronosequence of primary succession on a glacier foreland in Ellesmere Island, High Arctic Canada. Ecol Res 23:363–370

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Muc M, Freedman B, Svoboda J (1994) Vascular plant communities of a polar oasis at Alexandra Fiord, Ellesmere Island. In: Svoboda J, Freedman B (eds) Ecology of a polar oasis: Alexandra Fiord, Ellesmere Island, Canada. Captus University Publications, Toronto

    Google Scholar 

  • Okitsu S, Sawaguchi S-I, Hasegawa H, Kanda H (2004) Vegetation development on the glacier moraines in Oobloyah Valley, Ellesmere Island, High Arctic Canada. Polar Biosciences 17:83–94

    Google Scholar 

  • Parducci L, Jørgensen T, Tollefsrud MM, Elverland E, Alm T, Fontana SL, Bennett KD, Haile J, Matetovici I, Suyama Y, Edwards ME, Andersen K, Rasmussen M, Boessenkool S, Coissac E, Brochmann C, Taberlet P, Houmark-Nielsen M, Larsen NK, Orlando L, Gilbert MTP, Kjær KH, Alsos IG, Willerslev E (2012) Glacial survival of boreal trees in Northern Scandinavia. Science 335:1083–1086

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Petit RJ, Hu FS, Dick CW (2008) Forests of the past: a window to future changes. Science 320:1450–1452

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Peterson AT et al (2007) Transferability and model evaluation in ecological niche modeling: a comparison of GARP and Maxent. Ecography 30:550–560

    Google Scholar 

  • Phillips SJ, Anderson RP, Schapire RE (2006) Maximum entropy modeling of species geographic distributions. Ecol Model 190:231–259

    Google Scholar 

  • Pons O, Petit RJ (1996) Measuring and testing genetic differentiation with ordered versus unordered alleles. Genetics 144:1237–1245

    Google Scholar 

  • Rogers AR, Harpending H (1992) Population-growth makes waves in the distribution of pairwise genetic-differences. Mol Biol Evol 9:552–569

    PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Shaw J, Lickey EB, Schilling EE, Small RL (2007) Comparison of whole chloroplast genome sequences to choose noncoding regions for phylogenetic studies in angiosperms: the tortoise and the hare III. Am J Bot 94:275–288

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Steltzer H, Hufbauer RA, Welker JM, Casalis M, Sullivan PF Chimner R (2008) Frequent sexual reproduction and high intraspecific variation in Salix arctica: implications for a terrestrial feedback to climate change in the High Arctic. J Geophys Res 113:G03S10

    Google Scholar 

  • Tajima F (1989) The effect of change in population-size on DNA polymorphism. Genetics 123:597–601

    PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Thompson JD, Higgins DG, Gibson TJ (1994) CLUSTAL W: improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment through sequence weighting, position-specific gap penalties and weight matrix choice. Nucleic Acids Res 22:4673–4680

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Tremblay NO, Schoen DJ (1999) Molecular phylogeography of Dryas integrifolia: glacial refugia and postglacial recolonization. Mol Ecol 8:1187–1198

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Waltari E, Hijmans RJ, Peterson AT, Nyári ÁS, Perkins SL, Guralnick RP (2007) Locating Pleistocene refugia: comparing phylogeographic and ecological niche model predictions. PLoS ONE, 2, e563

Download references

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Global Center of Excellence, Yokohama National University, and by the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, the National Institute of Polar Research, Japan.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, Kyushu University, 1-6-10 Hakozaki, Higashi-ku, Fukuoka, 812-8581, Japan

    Makiko Mimura

  2. Environment and Information Sciences, Yokohama National University, 79-1 Tokiwadai, Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama, Kanagawa, 240-8501, Japan

    Akira S. Mori

  3. National Institute of Polar Research, 10-3 Midorisho, Tachikawa, Tokyo, 190-8518, Japan

    Masaki Uchida & Hiroshi Kanda

Authors
  1. Makiko Mimura
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Akira S. Mori
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Masaki Uchida
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Hiroshi Kanda
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Makiko Mimura.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary material 1 (DOCX 77 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Mimura, M., Mori, A.S., Uchida, M. et al. Colonization of vegetation-rich moraines and inference of multiple sources of colonization in the High Arctic for Salix arctica . Conserv Genet 14, 223–229 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10592-012-0413-3

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10592-012-0413-3

Keywords

Search

Navigation