Relationships Between Life History Characteristics and Electrophoretically Detectable Genetic Variation in Plants

Abstract

Numerous studies of morphological and physiological traits (reviewed in 3, 57, 95, 132, 135) as well as the more recent studies of enzyme loci (reviewed in 21, 52, 63) have generally shown the existence of significant amounts of genetic variation both within and between plant populations. These reviews (21, 52, 63) have also demonstrated considerable variation among species in intrapopulation allozyme variation. For instance, Hamrick (63) found that populations of woody plants contained higher levels of genetic variation than did populations of herbaceous species; Gottlieb (52) and Brown (21) demonstrated that predominantly outbreeding species maintain higher levels of intrapopulation genetic variation than predominantly inbreeding species. Nevo (111) found that habitat generalists and animal species with cosmopolitan or tropical distributions were typically more variable than species with specialized habitat preferences or temperate distributions. While these results are interesting and informative, they consider the influence of only a few evolutionarily important characteristics on the main-