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Among-population variation and plasticity to drought of Atlantic, Mediterranean, and interprovenance hybrid populations of maritime pine

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Abstract

Maritime pine grows naturally under a wide range of climatic conditions, from strongly Atlantic to strongly Mediterranean. Aiming to improve our understanding of the genetic structure and inheritance of drought resistance strategies in the species, we conducted an environmentally controlled experiment to assess the genetic variation and plasticity to drought of Atlantic and Mediterranean populations, and the interprovenance hybrids between them. Hybridization could also help to provide new genetic material for use in transitional areas between the two regions, for which reproductive materials of good quality are generally lacking. Plastic responses to water stress appeared to be highly conserved among populations, with a common conservative isohydric strategy based on promoting growth when water was abundant, and stopping it when water became limiting. We found, however, a strong intraspecific variation in biomass allocation patterns. The Atlantic populations showed a risky growth-based strategy with a larger amount of juvenile needles, whereas Mediterranean populations showed a more conservative strategy, minimizing aerial growth and increasing the proportion of adult needles that is more resistant to water loss. Hybrid populations performed more similarly to the Mediterranean parent, suggesting a dominance of the Mediterranean-like characteristics. Some of the tested hybrid populations, however, combined high growth with traits of drought adaptation, and thus represent potentially interesting materials for use in transitional regions between the two climate zones.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the effort made by many researchers and technicians of the Lourizán Forestry Research Centre, who undertook the controlled pollination, seeded the donor plants, propagated the plant material, installed the trial, applied the treatments, and assessed the traits. Particularly, we thank Sara Varela, Ana Hernández, Luis Sampedro, Xoaquín Moreira, José María Mendaña, Marisa Blanco, Maribel Juncal, Manuel Cerviño, and Emilio Pérez. We are also grateful to R. García Arranz for pollen collection in Espinoso del Rey. We acknowledge D. Brown for language revision. Valuable comments by three anonymous reviewers also helped to improve the quality of the manuscript. This study was partially supported by the research grants RTA07-100, PSE310000, and AGL2010-18724-COMPROPIN. RM is undertaking a postdoctoral scholarship at The University of Montana funded by the Barrié Foundation.

Data Archiving

Data has been submitted to the repository of the Spanish National Research Council (Digital.CSIC, http://digital.csic.es/) Accession number will be supplied once available.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Biological Sciences, The University of Montana, Missoula, MT, 59812, USA

    Raúl de la Mata

  2. Madera Plus Co., San Cibrao das Viñas, Ourense, Spain

    Esther Merlo

  3. Misión Biológica de Galicia, MBG-CSIC, Pontevedra, Spain

    Rafael Zas

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  1. Raúl de la Mata
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  2. Esther Merlo
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  3. Rafael Zas
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Correspondence to Raúl de la Mata.

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Communicated by S. N. Aitken

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de la Mata, R., Merlo, E. & Zas, R. Among-population variation and plasticity to drought of Atlantic, Mediterranean, and interprovenance hybrid populations of maritime pine. Tree Genetics & Genomes 10, 1191–1203 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11295-014-0753-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11295-014-0753-x

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