Background/Question/Methods: Saw palmetto (Serenoa repens) is a foundation species across many southeastern USA ecosystems, and in peninsular Florida, the endemic scrub palmetto (Sabal etonia) co-occurs with saw palmetto in drought and fire-prone scrub vegetation associations of the Lake Wales and Atlantic Coast Ridges. Both species also provide resources to a wide variety of animal species. Despite their high ecological importance, populations of saw and scrub palmettos on Florida's Lake Wales Ridge are becoming more fragmented due to human disturbances. While palmettos have demonstrated impressive persistence through natural disturbances including fire and drought, their seedlings exhibit slow recruitment and growth to maturity. Thus, understanding the demography of either palmetto including propagation patterns and longevities (age) of adults would provide crucial information for future conservation management. One adaptive strategy of plants of the xeric and fire-prone environments is vegetative propagation. While saw palmetto spreads clonally, scrub palmetto is not known to vegetatively propagate. Because these palmettos coexist, how genets of saw and scrub palmetto are distributed via different propagation strategies in sympatry becomes an intriguing question. As part of larger study of palmetto demography, the goal of the present study is to determine the genetic structure of a mixed-species population of saw and scrub palmettos (N = 415), sampled in a 20 m x 20 m study plot (27°10'59”N, 81°21'24”W) at Archbold Biological Station, Lake Placid, Florida, by use of Amplified Fragment Length Polymorphism fingerprinting.

Results/Conclusions: Through screening of 32 primer combinations, we have identified three selective primer pairs with which we can diagnose species and detect genetic structure within each species. The analysis is in progress and to be finished by May 2010. We predict that saw palmetto possesses a clonal structure and thus genetic diversity per area is higher in scrub palmetto. Using a clone-distribution map and the known growth rates of saw palmetto from our previous work, we can estimate ages of long-lived saw palmettos. The present study will help elucidate the capacities of saw and scrub palmetto to reproduce by clonal propagation and will provide an estimate of saw palmetto's life span. If saw palmetto is highly clonal and exhibits much longer life span than that currently known (up to 700 yr), the consequences of continued anthropogenic disturbance for palmetto populations may be irreversible.