Species of deer include musk deer in the pine zone of the Kashmir region, Nepal, and the Indian state of Sikkim; sambar deer practically over the whole region; and muntjac (barking deer) ranging northward into southernmost China.
Similar forest dieback had occurred in the region in the 1950s, when the lower extent of the ponderosa pine zone in Bandelier National Monument retreated upslope by as much as 2 km in less than five years in response to severe drought and an associated outbreak of bark beetles (Allen and Breshears 1998; Allen 2007).
The health and weight of grey squirrels in the pine marten zone is "extremely poor," while squirrels in an area without martens "are thriving".
Thresholding of this predicted Qs layer was then undertaken to delineate a molecularly defined jack pine lodgepole pine hybrid zone, where hybrids are defined by a Qs >0.1 and <0.9 according to Cullingham et al. (2012).
Using microsatellite genotyping together with geographic and genetic modeling, we described the physical structure of the lodgepole × jack pine hybrid zone in Alberta and the genomic contribution from the parental species.
In general, the highest transcript levels of GH61 family genes were observed on spruce heartwood, followed by spruce reaction zone, pine sapwood, cellulose and pine heartwood.
The generally lower transcript levels of HiGH61 genes on spruce reaction zone and pine heartwood compared with spruce heartwood and pine sapwood, respectively, are presumably related to the high concentration of antifungal compounds in spruce reaction zone and pine heartwood (Woodward et al. 1998).
Transcript levels of selected genes were determined for mycelium growing on six different media (Hagem, cellulose, spruce heartwood and reaction zone, and pine heartwood and sapwood) described above, using quantitative RT-PCR.
A hybrid zone of lodgepole pine × jack pine in parts of north central Alberta (Cullingham et al., 2011) provides a potential bridge, allowing D. ponderosae to become better suited to jack pine as a host, thereby providing access to the boreal forests across North America.
Although the patterns are certainly affected by incomplete lineage sorting, we expect that pollen flow (revealed by paternal plastid inheritance) and seed dispersal (revealed by maternal mitochondrial inheritance) have shaped the genotype of divergent pine populations in contact zones.
Below it is a subalpine zone where lodgepole pine, Englemann spruce, subalpine fir and aspen dominate the forest.
