Mating system and early viability resistance to habitat fragmentation in a bird-pollinated eucalypt

Data were used to demonstrate fitness impacts caused by fragmentation context. Showed extensive pollination can protect tree fitness from fragmentation. Grew open-pollinated progeny arrays of the bird-pollinated, mallee tree Eucalyptus incrassata in a randomised block design in a common garden experiment at Monarto, South Australia. Progeny arrays were collected from parental trees in either continuous forest or highly fragmented contexts. Data are therefore experimental, for hypothesis testing Data are not descriptive ecological, not plot based and not time-series. Data are not a representative sample of Eucalyptus incrassata and not representative of mallee eucalypts.

Credit
We at TERN acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians throughout Australia, New Zealand and all nations. We honour their profound connections to land, water, biodiversity and culture and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
Work was supported by the Australian Research Council Linkage project (LP110200805) and the South Australian Premier’s Science and Research Fund awarded to AJL, funding from the Native Vegetation Council of South Australia (grant 09/10/27), Nature Foundation SA Inc., Australian Geographic Society, Biological Society of South Australia, Field Naturalist Society of South Australia, Wildlife Preservation Society of Australia and National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility Travel Grants awarded to MFB. Thanks to Dr Barbara Hall for assistance identifying the fungal disease, Mt Lofty Botanic Gardens staff for assistance in rearing the seedlings and Rob Murphy and the many volunteers for assistance with the common garden experiment.

Purpose
Completed PhD by Dr Martin Breed at the University of Adelaide, supervised by Prof Andrew Lowe, Dr Mike Gardner and Dr Kym Ottewell. Main goals of PhD 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