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Gene flow by pollen dispersal from forestry plantations containing introduced species, provenances or selected elite breeding material may impact on local native forest by changing the genetic diversity, introducing new genes or gene combinations, or causing the extinction of rare genotypes in adjacent native forest areas. Patterns of pollen flow can be used to assess the risk of genetic pollution of native forest areas from nearby plantations. Pollen flow in an artificial population of Eucalyptus grandis was estimated using molecular markers and paternity analysis. Microsatellite genotyping was used to identify pollen parents of progeny arrays from six mother trees. Of 329 progeny analysed, 178 (54%) were assigned to pollen parents within the population. Pollen parents located within the population were between 0-192 m from the respective mother trees, with an average pollination distance of 57.96 m. Pollination of mother trees was outcrossed, not by nearest neighbours, and displayed a preference for inter-provenance matings within the population. Progeny that could not be assigned pollen parents within the population (46%) were assumed to have resulted from pollen immigration from external sources. These pollen flow parameters provide useful information about the dynamics of pollen movement within E. grandis populations and may be used in risk assessment of gene flow from plantations to adjacent areas of native forest.

Trees are typically more demanding than other plants to extract pure, high quality DNA for molecular genetics and may not necessarily be amenable to advances in extraction methodology suitable for other plants. A recently available, commercial, high throughput DNA extraction system utilising a silica binding matrix for purification and a multi-sample mixer mill for tissue disruption was evaluated for its suitability with Eucalyptus spp., Pinus spp. and Araucaria cunninghamii (hoop pine). DNA suitable for a range of molecular biology applications was successfully extracted from all genera. The method was highly reliable when tested in over 500 preparations and could be adapted to different tree species with relatively minor modifications to the standard protocols.3

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Unobtrusive sleep monitoring allows older adults to have continuous monitoring during the night in their own homes. We propose a method to reliably estimate respiratory rate using a bed-based pressure sensor array. Movements are detected prior to respiratory rate estimation and suppressed. The amount of movement during an estimate and a weighting for the estimate are used to create a reliability metric. The reliability metric is scored out of 100 for each sensor where high scores denote more reliable data. Once respiratory rates were calculated, the mean reliability metric determined the estimate reliability. Nocturnal data from a male and female participant was analyzed. Results show better accuracy and validity than both analysis without movement suppression and analysis with movement suppression but without postprocessing data fusion. While more than 50% of estimates include movement corruption, only 15% are unreliable and, moreover, removal of unreliable estimates significantly reduces estimate variance and provides validity estimation.