The study addressed different biological aspects of Juniperus oxycedrus subsp. macrocarpa, including female cone production, biometric analysis of mature cones and seeds, and their viability. The results indicate that the proportion of aborted female cones was very high. In the four populations studied, cone diameter and weight and seed length and weight were closely related. The distribution of numbers of seeds with and without embryos in mature cones was examined, as well as the frequency of numbers of seeds with embryos. The general trend in all populations was three seeds per mature cone, of which only one or two showed embryos. Tetrazolium tests showed the percentage of viable seeds to be lower.
The intra- and interpopulational geographic variation of three distant populations of J. oxycedrus subsp. macrocarpa was examined biometrically on the basis of morphological key-characters of needles, seeds and cones. The shortest Euclidean distances were used in the agglomerative grouping of closest neighbourhood and discrimination analysis with principal component analysis (PCA) was performed to verify the south-north differentiation of the taxon in Italy. Most of the cone and seed dimensional characters are correlated. No significant correlations were found between cone and needle characters. The sampled populations differ only insignificantly from one another, while the intrapopulational variation is slightly higher. Cone length as well as seed number, width and thickness were significantly correlated with geographic latitude, while the other four characters are not. Differences in cone shape were observed between individuals, so that several morphotypes can be distinguished.
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