Higher Levels of Multiple Paternities Increase Seedling Survival in the Long-Lived Tree Eucalyptus gracilis

<p> The dataset aims at studying associations between mating system parameters and fitness in natural populations of trees. Fifty-eight open-pollinated progeny arrays were collected from trees in three populations. Progeny were planted in a reciprocal transplant trial. Fitness was measured by family establishment rates. We genotyped all trees and their progeny at eight microsatellite loci. Planting site had a strong effect on fitness, but seed provenance and seed provenance × planting site did not. Populations had comparable mating system parameters and were generally outcrossed, experienced low biparental inbreeding and high levels of multiple paternity. As predicted, seed families that had more multiple paternities also had higher fitness, and no fitness-inbreeding correlations were detected. Demonstrating that fitness was most affected by multiple paternities rather than inbreeding, we provide evidence supporting the constrained inbreeding hypothesis; i.e. that multiple paternity may impact on fitness over and above that of inbreeding, particularly for preferentially outcrossing trees at life stages beyond seed development. This dataset could potentially be reused for meta-analysis or review of effects of habitat fragmentation on plants (e.g. pollination, mating system, genetic diversity etc). Please contact owner prior to re-use. </p> <p>This is part of the authors' PhD at the University of Adelaide, supervised by Prof Andrew Lowe, Dr Mike Gardner and Dr Kym Ottewell. Main goals of the project were 1. Examine and quantify the impact of fragmentation and tree density on mating patterns, and how this may vary with pollinators of differing mobility 2. Determine the theoretical expectations and perform empirical tests of mating pattern-fitness relationships in trees 3. Explore the plant genetic resource management implications that arise from the observations in aims 1 and 2 </p>