BACKGROUND A central aim of island biogeography is to understand the colonization history of insular species using current distributions, fossil records and genetic diversity. Here, we analyze five plastid DNA regions of the endangered Juniperus brevifolia, which is endemic to the Azores archipelago. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS The phylogeny of the section Juniperus and the phylogeographic...

A rare coniferous Tertiary relict tree species, Thuja sutchuenensis Franch, has survived in the Daba Mountains of southwestern China. It was almost eliminated by logging during the past century. We measured size and age structures and interpreted regeneration dynamics of stands of the species in a variety of topographic contexts and community associations. Forest communities containing T. sutch...

In this study, pollen grains were sampled by using a Lanzoni trap (Lanzoni VPPS 2000) in atmosphere of Bursa in 1999 and 2000. During two years. a total of 13,991 pollen grains/m3 which belonged to 59 taxa and unidentified pollen grains were recorded. A total of 7.768 pollen grains were identified in 1999 and a total of 6.223 in 2000. From these taxa, 36 belong to arboreal and 23 taxa to non-ar...

Baltic amber constitutes the largest known deposit of fossil plant resin and the richest repository of fossil insects of any age. Despite a remarkable legacy of archaeological, geochemical and palaeobiological investigation, the botanical origin of this exceptional resource remains controversial. Here, we use taxonomically explicit applications of solid-state Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) m...

Chamaecyparis nootkatensis is an ecologically and economically important conifer of the north Pacific coastal forests. To aid in studies of clonal structure and genetic differentiation of this and related species, we isolated and characterized microsatellites from C. nootkatensis. A microsatellite-enriched library yielded 75 repeat-containing sequences for which primer pairs were designed. Only...