Abstract
Short or long-term ex situ conservation is becoming increasingly important in conservation of plants in today’s changing environments. One of the important steps in ex situ conservation is the collection and storage of seeds and the consequent establishment of seed germination protocols. Cerastium dinaricum (Caryophyllaceae) is an endemic, high elevation and rare species of European conservation concern. Because of its severely fragmented distribution along the Dinaric Alps, the populations are likely to undergo further shrinkage in the future, which addresses the need of a long-term effective conservation management. From the potential ex situ population management perspective, we focused our study on germination ecology of C. dinaricum. The study revealed that temperature considerably affected the germination of seeds, which germinate better at 20 °C rather than 10 °C. A period of cold-wet stratification also significantly improved the final germination percentage with more pronounced increase at 20 °C, while addition of GA3 increased the final germination percentage by breaking the dormancy of non-stratified seeds. Mechanical scarification did not improve germination; on the contrary, it resulted in the lowest germination success. Seeds grown in complete darkness germinated significantly better compared to control when they were exposed to cold-wet stratification. Contrary to previous studies on some alpine species, which germinate better when exposed to light, dark treatment resulted in the highest germination percentages with 70 and 90% germination success after 4 and 8 weeks of stratification, respectively.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the Croatian Environment Agency for collection permits for Croatia (no. 517-07-1-1-1-16-4) and the Institute of the Republic of Slovenia for Nature Conservation (no. 35603-4/2016 - 3) for providing seeds from the Slovenian population; Jure Jugovic for technical assistance; Jana Laganis for help in the field work in Slovenia, Jasenka Topić for the help in organising the fieldwork in Croatia and the anonymous referees for valuable comments on the manuscript.
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Fišer Pečnikar, Ž., Balant, M., Glasnović, P. et al. Seed dormancy and germination of the rare, high elevation Balkan endemic Cerastium dinaricum (Caryophyllaceae). Biologia 73, 937–943 (2018). https://doi.org/10.2478/s11756-018-0115-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/s11756-018-0115-5