Abstract
Species of Alnus (alders) have become invaders in several parts of the world. Here we report the presence of three naturalized alien species: A. glutinosa, A. incana and A. rubra from several populations in nature reserves of northwestern Patagonia, an area of remarkably high biodiversity. Alnus glutinosa had been cited previously for Chile and southern Argentina, but A. incana and A. rubra are here reported for the first time. As we found morphological variation within and among the populations of these introduced species that makes their discrimination difficult, we used chloroplast (trnH-psbA) and nuclear ribosomal (ITS) DNA sequences to confirm their identifications from morphological characteristics. Results from nuclear and chloroplast sequence data confirm the morphological tentative identification of the three species and remark the utility of molecular information together with morphology for the detection of introduced species of taxonomically difficult groups. The invasive characteristics of these alien tree species are discussed in relation to the conservation of the nature reserves where they are found.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to park rangers of Lanín National Park for fieldwork assistance and to Nahuel Huapi National Park Administration (APN) for partial financial support to PE. Our appreciation to three anonymous reviewers for useful comments on the manuscript. We also acknowledge funding from Universidad Nacional del Comahue PIN B205, CONICET PIP 112-201301-00357, and ANPCyT-FONCyT PICT 2014-0584.
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Calviño, C.I., Edwards, P., Fernández, M. et al. Not one but three: undetected invasive Alnus species in northwestern Patagonia confirmed with cpDNA and ITS sequences. Biol Invasions 20, 2715–2722 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-018-1744-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-018-1744-x