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Multivariate analysis of morphological variation among closely related species Bromus japonicus, B. squarrosus and B. arvensis (Poaceae) in comparison with isozyme evidences
Author(s) -
Oja Tatjana,
Paal Jaanus
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
nordic journal of botany
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.333
H-Index - 33
eISSN - 1756-1051
pISSN - 0107-055X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1756-1051.2004.tb01939.x
Subject(s) - biology , bromus , upgma , botany , lemma (botany) , taxon , taxonomy (biology) , poaceae , genetic variation , genetics , gene
Morphological variation and taxonomic continuum of 110 specimens of Bromus arvensis, B. japonicus and B. squarrosus were analysed to assess the morphological variability of these close taxa. The importance of every morphological character was estimated by the GLM procedure. Stepwise discriminant analysis was used in order to find a set of morphological characters that maximises differences among the species. According to this, the most important characters appeared to be the length of anthers, width of lemma and lemma margin angle shape. The most important characters for the determination of Bromus arvensis was the length of anthers and for B. squarrosus width of lemma. According to the UPGMA cluster analysis, canonical discriminant, classificatory discriminant and principal component analyses, all specimens were separated into three moderately distinct groups which corresponded to the three traditional species. The study showed that qualitative characters were the best for the delimitation of the tax a by statistical analyses and demonstrated the incongruity between the pattern of morphological and genetic (allozyme) variation among the three Bromus species.