We had a productive season of field work

A natural of extension of our recently published work on adaptive introgression in Populus is to study the hybrid zone(s) in greater detail to better account for all potential types of progeny resulting from backcrosses. One of the inadequacies in our previous study was that the sampling was biased towards P. balsamifera-like individuals. This summer our goal was to remove this bias by doing a more extensive sampling of hybrids, morphologically leaning towards either parent. In addition we also added more individuals of pure P. balsamifera to get an idea of species-specific standing genetic variation.

In July 2019, we traveled extensively in parts of Wyoming and South Dakota for sampling. We thank the staff botanists and administrators at Shoshoni, Bighorn and Black Hills National Forests whose assistance in planning our trips was crucial to our success.