UC Berkeley

Grindelia is among the most taxonomically challenging groups of North American composites. The genus as a whole has an amphitropical distribution, with approximately half of the species native to North America and Mexico and the remainder native to South America. I used DNA sequence data from the nuclear ribosomal ITS and ETS and chloroplast psaI-accD regions to revisit hypotheses on biogeographic history across the genus. Grindelia as a whole is well-supported and is composed of two sister clades, one native to South America and the other native to North America, including Mexico. The South American taxa are much more diverse in habit than the North American taxa. The North American taxa constitute two clades that largely occur on different sides of the Continental Divide. The diverse radiation of Grindelia in the California Floristic Province (CA-FP) appears to be most closely related to species from the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau and evidently descended from drought-adapted ancestors. Although Steyermark's hypotheses about the relationships of North American Grindelia are not all supported, I did recover a clade corresponding to his Pacific radiation and many of the Mexican and Texan species that he hypothesized to be basal in the genus represent early diverging lineages in my trees.

Polyploid complexes have long been a source of confusion to taxonomists due to their combination of morphological and ecological variability with a lack of obvious boundaries between putative species. Grindelia (Asteraceae) in the CA-FP provides a prime example of both of these attributes. Both diploid and tetraploid plants occur within the CA-FP, with tetraploids predominating along the coast and diploids in the interior. Although phylogenetic analysis shows that CA-FP Grindelia form a clade, relationships within the clade remain unresolved due to a lack of sequence divergence. Complex ecological and morphological variation within CA-FP Grindelia has been interpreted as being indicative of either extensive or no taxonomic diversity. I have chosen to follow an intermediate approach, recognizing what I consider to be the most morphological and ecologically distinctive ecotypes or clusters of ecotypes as taxa. In addition, I emphasized putative taxa that appear to maintain their morphological distinctiveness when growing sympatrically or peripatrically in the field.

Most of the morphological and ecological diversity in CA-FP Grindelia is present in the tetraploids, which appear to be autotetraploids based on cytogenetic data from prior studies. I used data from six nuclear microsatellites to examine 439 individuals from ten populations (nine tetraploid and one diploid) of Grindelia collected in and near the San Francisco Bay Area. I wanted to assess whether any genetic structure was evident across populations or taxa or both. Each of the ten populations was genetically distinct from the others and gene flow among populations appeared to be low. Although the plants grouped more strongly according to population than according to taxon, it was possible to classify > 90% of the individuals according to taxon using discriminant analysis of the microsatellite data.