Context matters: the landscape matrix determines the population genetic structure of temperate forest herbs across Europe

Context. Plant populations in agricultural landscapes are mostly fragmented and their functional connectivity often depends on seed and pollen dispersal by animals. However, little is known about how the interactions of seed and pollen dispersers with the agricultural matrix translate into gene flow among plant populations.

Objectives. We aimed to identify effects of the landscape structure on the genetic diversity within, and the genetic differentiation among, spatially isolated populations of three temperate forest herbs. We asked, whether different arable crops have different effects, and whether the orientation of linear landscape elements relative to the gene dispersal direction matters.

Methods. We analysed the species’ population genetic structures in seven agricultural landscapes across temperate Europe using microsatellite markers. These were modelled as a function of landscape composition and configuration, which we quantified in buffer zones around, and in rectangular l..., The data refer to 42, 34 and 36 populations of the forest herbs Anemone nemorosa, Oxalis acetosella and Polygonatum multiflorum, respectively, sampled in seven 5 x 5 km² landscape windows across Europe (North France, Belgium, West Germany, East Germany, South Sweden, Central Sweden,  Estonia). The location of each population is published in the related dataset https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.tb2rbp00k .

The dataset comprises

(a) pairwise genetic differentiation among populations within landscape windows

The microsatellite allele data used to calculate pairwise genetic differentiation among populations are available and have been described in the related dataset https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.tb2rbp00k . We used two measures of genetic differentiation, G''ST (Meirmans & Hedrick 2011, Mol Ecol Resour 11(1):5-18) and DPS (= 1 minus the proportion of shared alleles).

 

(b) landscape metrics calculated for buffer zones around each population

We calculated a set of landsc..., See the README file.