Posted by Gus on 8/7/2008, 4:13 pm, in reply to "Re: Gus"
83.32.127.186
Håkan, it is hard to tell. I cannot see the future (yet!). Apparently it is a severe disease. Being in an island, it is quite possible all your Ash trees are relatively close relatives. This means, that it is quite possible they most of them are the progeny of the progeny of the progeny of the progeny of a very small amount of trees whose seed (so its genes) arrived once to the island and later colonised it by reproducing on it (and propagating that same amount of limited genes).
This is exactly called "founder effect". It leads to a narrow genetic variation, so less chances to have very different individuals, so less chances for some of those very different individuals being partially tolerant or fully resistant to the disease.
If a huge number over the total of your trees has already symptoms, in your case the chances of having a resistant number of them is theoretically lower than in a bigger island, or a bigger Ash tree population (with more genetic diversity).
But this same thing can happen for exactly the opposite: if when the disease keeps spreading to the West, some island surrounded by many diseased trees looks unscathed... the founder effect preserved some genetic strains that are naturally resistant to this disease. And from these, the resistant ash clones can be obtained to re-plant.
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