Portuguese Pinus nigra JF Arnold populations: genetic diversity, structure and relationships inferred by SSR markers

Pinus nigra J.F. Arnold has an ecological and economic interest in Europe, but many of the planted populations have an unknown origin and infraspecific taxonomy. Six Portuguese P. nigra populations characterised with microsatellites revealed high intra-population diversity structured into two clusters with low differentiation that might suggest two provenances or infraspecific taxa. Despite compared with foreign samples from different subspecies, we were not able to infer about the origin or infraspecific taxonomy of the Portuguese populations based on the pooled microsatellite data .