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The Spathelia-Ptaeroxylon clade is well placed in Rutaceae and it is reasonable to unite the genera into one subfamily (Spathelioideae). We propose a new tribal classification of Spathelioideae. A narrow circumscription of Spathelia is established to make the genus monophyletic, and Sohnreyia is resurrected to accommodate the South American species of Spathelia. The most recent common ancestor of Spathelioideae probably had leaves with secretory cavities and oil cells, haplostemonous flowers with appendaged staminal filaments, and a tracheidal tegmen.

Melicope (Rutaceae) is one of the largest plant genera on the Hawaiian Islands. We present here a detailed molecular phylogenetic analysis of the Hawaiian species of this genus and compare the results with the other genera of Hawaiian Rutaceae, Platydesma and Zanthoxylum. Four nuclear and two plastid markers were sequenced, with the goals of untangling phylogenetic relationships, inferring biogeographic events and comparing patterns of distribution among the three genera. Our results show that there were two colonization events (Melicope + Platydesma, and Zanthoxylum) to the Hawaiian Islands, that Hawaiian Rutaceae have an Asian, Australian or Pacific origin and that there were two independent colonization events of Hawaiian Melicope lineages to the Marquesas Islands. The two most widely distributed Hawaiian Melicope spp. are not monophyletic and the current subgeneric classification of Hawaiian Melicope is highly artificial. On the Hawaiian Islands, Melicope and Zanthoxylum show contrasting biogeographic patterns, suggesting different patterns of dispersal. Melicope has a high percentage of single‐island endemics suggesting low dispersal ability, whereas Zanthoxylum taxa tend to occur across multiple islands. © 2013 The Linnean Society of London, Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, 2014, 174, 425–448.

Systematic biology is a discipline rooted in collections. These collections play important roles in research and conservation and are integral to our efforts to educate society about biodiversity and conservation. Collections provide an invaluable record of the distribution of organisms throughout the world and through recent and geological time, and they are the only direct documentation of the biological, physical, and cultural diversity of the planet: past, present, and future. Recent developments in bioinformatics and cyberinfrastructure are transforming systematics by opening up new opportunities and as a result major digitization efforts have increasingly made available large amounts of biodiversity data. The collections‐based systematics community needs to train the next‐generation of systematists with integrative skills, address grand questions about biodiversity at different scales, develop a community‐wide cyberinfrastructure, effectively disseminate systematic data to biologists and the public, and proactively educate the public and policy makers on the importance of systematics and collections in the biodiversity crisis of the Anthropocene. Specifically, we call for a new global Biodiversity CyberBank, comparable to GenBank for genetic data, to be the repository of all biodiversity data, as well as a World Organization of Systematic Biology to lead major initiatives of the field. We also outline a new workflow for taxonomic monographs, which utilizes both the traditional strengths of synthesizing diverse collections‐based taxonomic data and the capacity of online resources and bioinformatics tools.

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The genus Melicope (Rutaceae) occurs on most Pacific archipelagos and is perfectly suited to study Pacific biogeography. The main goal was to infer the age, geographic origin and colonization patterns of Melicope and its relatives. We sequenced three nuclear and two plastid markers for 332 specimens that represent 164 species in 16 genera of Rutaceae. Phylogenetic reconstruction, molecular dating, ancestral area reconstruction and diversification analyses were carried out. The two main clades (Acronychia‐Melicope and Euodia) originated in Australasia and their crown ages are dated to the Miocene. Diversification rates differed among the subclades and were lowest in the Euodia lineage and highest in the Hawaiian Melicope lineage. The Malagasy and Mascarene species form a clade, which split from its SE Asian relatives in the Pliocene/Pleistocene. At least eight colonizations to the Pacific islands occurred. The timing of all colonizations except for the Hawaiian group is congruent with age of the island ages. Australia, New Guinea and New Caledonia have been the source of colonizations into the Pacific islands in the Melicope clade. Melicope shows high dispersability and has colonized remote archipelagos such as the Austral and Marquesas Islands each twice. Colonization of islands of the Hawaiian‐Emperor seamount chain likely predates the ages of the current main islands, and the initial colonization to Kaua'i occurred after the splitting of the Hawaiian lineage into two subclades. Wider ecological niches and adaptations to bird‐dispersal likely account for the much higher species richness in the Acronychia‐Melicope clade compared to the Euodia clade.

Rutaceae is a family of angiosperms well known for the economically important genus Citrus. The division of Rutaceae into subfamilies is still inadequate and provisional. Previous phylogenetic studies at the family level are characterized by a limited sampling of genera and lack several crucial taxa. Here, we present a phylogenetic study based on six nuclear and plastid markers including 87.7% of the currently accepted genera, which is more than twice as many as in previous studies. Seven genera are included in a phylogenetic analysis for the first time. Most clades are resolved with high support, and we propose a new subfamily classification for Rutaceae that comprises the subfamilies Amyridoideae, Aurantioideae, Cneoroideae, Haplophylloideae, Rutoideae and Zanthoxyloideae. Aurantioideae is the only traditional subfamily that is resolved as monophyletic. We tested whether 13 morphological and karyological characters are taxonomically informative in Rutaceae. Chromosome numbers are clearly different in the two main clades of Rutaceae, but fruit characteristics, which have been used to define subfamilies in the past, do not distinguish between the main lineages of the family.