Pre-Linnaean herbaria viva of Helwing in the collections of the National Library of Poland and the University of Warsaw

Georg Andreas Helwing (1666–1748) was the author of two important early accounts on the flora of former East Prussia: “Flora qusimodogenita” and “Supplementum florae prussicae”. Along with his son-in-law Matthias Ernst Boretius, he prepared several herbaria viva. Four of these herbaria survived until WWII; however, their whereabouts since WWII have been generally unknown. In this paper, two of these herbaria are described: one preserved in the collections of the National Library of Poland and another in the herbarium of the Faculty of Biology of the University of Warsaw. Both were formerly in the possession of the Königsberg city library. These herbaria document not only Helwing’s studies on the native flora of Prussia but also his experiments with acclimation of exotic species in his garden in Stullichen (Stulichy, Poland). They are also an important source of vernacular Polish and German names of plants

Pre-Linnaean herbaria viva of Helwing in the collections of the National Library of Poland and the University of Warsaw

Georg Andreas Helwing (1666–1748) was the author of two important early accounts on the flora of former East Prussia: “Flora qusimodogenita” and “Supplementum florae prussicae”. Along with his son-in-law Matthias Ernst Boretius, he prepared several herbaria viva. Four of these herbaria survived until WWII; however, their whereabouts since WWII have been generally unknown. In this paper, two of these herbaria are described: one preserved in the collections of the National Library of Poland and another in the herbarium of the Faculty of Biology of the University of Warsaw. Both were formerly in the possession of the Königsberg city library. These herbaria document not only Helwing’s studies on the native flora of Prussia but also his experiments with acclimation of exotic species in his garden in Stullichen (Stulichy, Poland). They are also an important source of vernacular Polish and German names of plants

Laserocarpum, a new genus of Apiaceae endemic to Greece

Laserpitium pseudomeum is an endemic umbellifer of Greece occurring in the mountains of Sterea Ellas and northern Peloponnese. Molecular data indicate that it is not related to its putative congeners, but instead constitutes an isolated lineage. The nuclear ribosomal DNA ITS tree places it as a weakly supported sister group to Portenschlagiella ramosissima, the sole species in its genus, whereas the tree inferred from three noncoding cpDNA loci does not confirm this relationship. Portenschlagiella ramosissima is sometimes placed in Athamanta, an affinity supported neither by molecular data nor by fruit morphology. Laserpitium pseudomeum notably differs from P. ramosissima in vegetative, flower, and fruit characteristics, and no obvious morphological synapomorphies indicate their close relationship. Therefore, we place L. pseudomeum in the newly described genus Laserocarpum and lectotypify the species with the specimen Orphanides 2019 (G00766460) at G-Boiss

Phylogeny estimation and phylogenetic inference in evolutionary studies

Modern phylogenetics, although rooted in Darwin's and Haeckel's ideas on evolutionary relationships among organisms, dates back to the second half of the 20th century and the advance of numerical methods in taxonomy. Its beginnings were marked by a fierce debate between phenetics and cladistics but at present it incorporates a diverse array of methods including those based on distance and clustering algorithms, parsimony, maximum likelihood and Bayesian statistics. The phylogeny of extant organisms is usually inferred using molecular markers, because they are genetic, less arbitrary (do not require arbitrary coding), more additive, less prone to convergence and more universal than traditional morphological markers. Phylogenies inferred using molecular data are usually more stable and have better internal support than those obtained from morphology. However, the informed user of phylogenetics methods must be aware of their assumptions and caveats. The chosen sequences must be orthologous (resulting from a speciation event), as opposed to paralogous (resulting from a duplication event); choosing orthologous sequences does not guarantee that the phylogenetic signal is undisturbed. Reversals, multiple hits and parallel substitutions may result in a higher similarity of sequences than expected from their evolutionary history and therefore affect the phylogenetic reconstructions. Moreover, trees inferred from molecular data are usually gene trees rather than species trees. There are several processes that may result in discordance between a gene tree and an organism tree including interspecific hybridisation, horizontal gene transfer, incomplete lineage sorting and selection for allele polymorphism. The most commonly used phylogenetic methods include those based on parsimony, distance and clustering, maximum likelihood and Bayesian statistics. The last three employ nucleotide substitution models. Each method is based on certain evolutionary assumptions that may not necessarily apply to a given data set. Noteworthy are recent advances in methods of inferring divergence times using relaxed molecular clock. In evolutionary biology, molecular phylogenies are widely used in comparative studies, historical biogeography and for analysing character state evolution

The Utility of Morphological Characters for Inferring Phylogeny in Scandiceae Subtribe Scandicinae (Apiaceae)

Volume: 88Start Page: 270End Page: 30

Analytical advances alleviate model misspecification in non--Brownian multivariate comparative methods

Adams and Collyer (2018) argue that contemporary multivariate (Gaussian) phylogenetic comparative methods are prone to favouring more complex models of evolution and sometimes rotation invariance can be an issue. Here we dissect the concept of rotation invariance and point out that, depending on the understanding, this can be an issue with any method that relies on numerical instead of analytical estimation approaches. We relate this to the ongoing discussion concerning phylogenetic principal components analysis. Contrary to what Adams and Collyer (2018) found, we do not observe a bias against the simpler Brownian motion process in simulations when we use the new, improved, likelihood evaluation algorithm employed by mvSLOUCH, which allows for studying much larger phylogenies and more complex model setups.Additional (potentially updated) simulation results and data can be found at https://github.com/krzbar/KJVJMRKK_mvSLOUCH . Furthermore, connected data and simulation results can be found at https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.sj3tx9656 and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7499740

Which changes are needed to render all genera of the German lora monophyletic?

53 p., gráf.The use of DNA sequence data in plant systematics has brought us closer than ever to formulating well-founded hypotheses about phylogenetic relationships, and phylogenetic research keeps on revealing that plant genera as traditionally circumscribed often are not monophyletic. Here, we assess the monophyly of all genera of vascular plants found in Germany. Using a survey of the phylogenetic literature, we discuss which classifications would be consistent with the phylogenetic relationships found and could be followed, provided monophyly is accepted as the primary criterion for circumscribing taxa. We indicate whether and which names are available when changes in generic assignment are made (but do not present a comprehensive review of the nomenclatural aspects of such names). Among the 840 genera examined, we identified c. 140 where data quality is sufficiently high to conclude that they are not monophyletic, and an additional c. 20 where monophyly is questionable but where data quality is not yet sufficient to reach convincing conclusions. While it is still fiercely debated how a phylogenetic tree should be translated into a classification, our results could serve as a guide to the likely consequences of systematic research for the taxonomy of the German flora and the floras of neighbouring countries.Peer reviewe