A STRATEGY FOR IDENTIFYING INTRODUCED PROVENANCES AND TRANSLOCATIONS

Native species of oak in Britain have been of great importance in our history for their many uses, and have thus been subject to management and planting by man for centuries. Following events such as the Enclos ure Acts of the late eighteenth century and the Napoleonic wars, many oaks would have been planted. Translocations and introductions of fore ign genotypes were greatly encouraged by early landscape gardeners suc h as Capability Brown. Britain must, therefore be a mosaic of native a nd non-native oaks. A major problem arises when we try to identify non -native trees. Due to their long life-cycle, oaks are of necessity bot h phenotypically plastic and genetically very variable and it has been virtually impossible to discriminate between native and non-native fo rms using traditional methods. The advent of new molecular genetic tec hniques however, now allows us to identify DNA markers that can distin guish between such forms. The geographic patterns for two chloroplast DNA markers will be presented. One clearly differentiates between oaks from eastern Europe versus western Europe and can be used to identify translocations of eastern European oaks into Britain and western Euro pe. The second identifies genotypes native to East Anglia and can be u sed to recognize translocations into and out of East Anglia.