Sexual and clonal reproduction in alpine plant life: persistence and dispersal as key processes to explain the maintenance of genetic diversity

Abstract

Current theories on the maintenance of genetic diversity have been developed for animal organisms and focus on the effects of spatial dispersal of mobile organisms with separate sexes, usually referred to as metapopulation theory. In an ongoing project we ask whether and how this dominant theoretical concept also applies to sessile plants which occur in the extreme patchy and fragmented alpine landscape and which possess complex reproducrive systems. We use demographic field work, an experimental approach and molecular tools to answer the following questions: (1) How important is dispersal by seeds and the colonisation of new sites in the alpine landscape? (2) How effectively does it affect the balance between sexual and asexual reproduction? (3) How is the spatial genetic structure in alpine clonal species related to the dispersal of pollen and seeds?