Because pollen density drops off rapidly with increasing distance from its source, most mating in conifer stands might be expected to occur among near neighbors. The "neighborhood" model was applied to multilocus allelic (allozyme) arrays observed in pollen gametes of seeds from individual mother trees to estimate mating pattern parameters in a high density stand of knobcone pine (kp, Pinus attenuata Lemmon.), and in one high density (Dfhd) and one low density (Dfld) stand of Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco). In the neighborhood model, an arbitrarily specified area around a mother tree (with radius r) is designated its neighborhood, and the paternity of the mother tree's offspring is partitioned into three sources: selfing (with probability s), outcrossing to males outside the neighborhood (m), and outcrossing to males within the neighborhood (1-s-m). In kp (mean tree height = 6 m), neighborhoods (r = 11 m) included an average of 44 potential outcross males, while in Douglas-fir, neighborhoods (r = 70 m) included 18 potential outcross males in Dfld (mean height = 46m) and 44 in Dfhd (mean height = 38m).

 Estimated s was zero or nearly so in all three stands, but m was quite high (0.84 in Dfld, 0.74 in Dfhd, and 0.56 in kp). In addition, mating success of outcross males within neighborhoods was only weakly associated, at best, with distance from the mother tree. Thus, near neighbors accounted for only a small percentage of the effective mating in these stands, such that the effective number of mates for each mother tree was quite large. As expected, males within neighborhoods contributed to a higher proportion of the mating in Dfhd than in Dfld, but only marginally so. The lower estimate of m in kp neighborhoods is probably because kp was more isolated from other populations of the same species (i.e., less gene flow), than the Douglas-fir stands.