Extensive clonal spread and longevity of saw palmetto (Serenoa repens) provide insight into management plans

As an ecologically important foundation species, Serenoa repens provides crucial structural and functional services to many southeastern United States ecosystems. Its fruits are valuable to many vertebrates including medicinal uses by humans. Many land managers, however, consider Serenoa a troublesome plant that spread rapidly to dominate other plants. Accordingly, management plans have been developed to reduce Serenoa. Yet, we have little evidence of Serenoa spread/invasion. Furthermore, our understanding of its life history traits including generation time, clonal propagation, and seed recruitment is limited, which provides a poor basis for the development of proper management plans. By using AFLPs and clonal-network modeling, our goal is to reveal such life history information to provide insights into proper Serenoa management. We analyzed 263 Serenoa and 134 Sabal etonia (a sympatric non-clonal palmetto) samples collected from a 20 x 20 m plot in Florida scrub. Sabal samples were us...