Phylogeographic study of 10 herbaceous plants native in Japan based on intraspecific chloroplast DNA variation

Despite of growing public demand for revegetation using local seeds and seedlings, such local seeds are not available commercially for native herbaceous species and even there is no agreed definition of local seed zones. In this study, we investigated the intraspecific chloroplast DNA variations and their geographical distributions of 10 herbaceous plants including 9 grasses and 1 leguminosae native in Japan, as indicators of regionality to determine seed zones of the native herbaceous species. Eragrostis ferruginea, Arundinella hirta, Microstegium vimineum, Calamagrostis epigeios, Imperata cylindrica, and Lespedeza pilosa had both common haplotype being widespread in Japan and some haplotypes those distributions showed regionality, so that suggest us to have enough examinations and discussions when we would consider the regionality. On the other side, other 4 species showed mostly uniform geographical distributions throughout Japan. The statistical test did not show an impact of human activity to the present distribution of haplotypes of any species: allelic richness were not different significantly between sampling spots where surrounding road densities were high or low.