Spore diversity among species of Blechnaceae in the Atlantic Forest

Abstract

The palynological diversity of Blechnaceae in the Atlantic Forest was investigated. While the monophyletic family belongs to the group of leptosporangiate ferns, a new classification proposed by recent phylogenetic study reorganizes the family and adds new genera. To expand palynological knowledge of the group, the spore morphology of 23 species and a hybrid, distributed among 10 genera, was described. Material from herbarium collections were submitted to acetolysis and mounted on slides, with subsequent statistical analysis of spore measurements. Photomicrographs of the material were taken under both light and scanning electron microscopy. Perine ornamentation varied among psilate, rugulate and scabrate; granules and gemmae were present along with thin, smooth cristae. Species of Blechnum and Austroblechnum exhibited the greatest diversity. The attributes of the spores obtained here were able to differentiate the analyzed species, although the spore morphology of some taxa was found to be very similar. Multivariate analysis assessed the relevance of quantitative data for differentiating the taxa.

Biometrics of the sporangia and spores of the Parablechnum cordatum complex (Blechnaceae, Polypodiopsida)

“…Spores are a character of great importance when making taxonomic classifications in ferns (Barrington et al 1986(Barrington et al , 2020Tryon & Lugardon 1991;Tryon & Tryon 1982). Specifically, in the case of the family Blechnaceae several studies have been made concerning the spores (Melo da Silva et al 2019;Moran et al 2018;Pasarrelli et al 2010), and recently others that allow us to discriminate species and genera within this family using, in addition to the spores, the information concerning the sporangia (Molino et al 2020).…”

“…Particularly, spores have come out as important characters within the family Blechnaceae, and so do the sporangia (Melo da Silva et al 2019;Molino et al 2020;Moran et al 2018;Prada et al 2016;Passarelli et al 2010).…”

Revision of Cranfillia opaca in New Caledonia

“…Dittrich, and Blechnum s.s. Cranfillia is distributed throughout the Southern Hemisphere. Although species of Cranfillia are clearly supported as a clade by molecular data (Cranfill 2001;Gabriel y Galán et al 2013;Perrie et al 2014;Bauret 2017;Gasper et al 2017;Bauret et al 2020), in the studies carried out so far, there seems to be a large variation both at morphological and anatomical levels (Gabriel y Galán et al 2008;Passarelli et al 2010;Prada et al 2016;Moran et al 2018;Silva et al 2019;Bauret et al 2020).…”

“…As such, the family has undergone many nomenclatural changes, with new described genera, resurrected names, and new combinations (Gasper et al 2016). This new classification has been adopted by different authors (Bauret 2017;Dittrich et al 2017;Vicent et al 2017Vicent et al , 2018Moran et al 2018;Smith & Kessler 2018;Molino et al 2019;Silva et al 2019;Bauret et al 2020), and accepted by the global phylogeny of pteridophytes (PPG I 2016). However, there are detractors of this classification (Christenhusz & Chase 2018;Brownsey & Perrie 2019;Perrie et al 2021), some of them following another less-segregated classification proposal (Perrie et al 2014), or authors who have simply preferred to continue using the traditional nomenclature (Chambers & Wilson 2019), in which almost the entirety of the current subfamily Blechnoideae Gasper, V.A.O.…”

New combinations in Cranfillia (Blechnaceae: Polypodiopsida) for recent segregates of the Blechnum vulcanicum complex

“…), consensus seems to favour recognition of a broadly circumscribed Blechnum (see the Australian Plant Consensus (Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria (CHAH) 2018, accessed 19 August 2019) as advocated by Perrie et al (2014) whereas elsewhere the narrower circumscription of Blechnum advocated by Gasper et al (2016), Pteridophyte Phylogeny Group 1 [PPG 1] (2016), Gasper et al (2017) and Dittrich et al (2017) has been more or less adopted, e.g. Farris et al (2018), Smith & Kessler (2018), da Silva et al 2019Molino et al (2019), Jaman (in press). In New Zealand however, a consensus view has not been achieved with the New Zealand Plant Names Database Ngā Tipu o Aotearoa (NZPND, accessed 6 August 2019) following Perrie et al (2016) in recognising only Blechnum whilst the New Zealand Plant Conservation Network (NZPCN, accessed 6 August 2019) accept the treatment of Gasper et al (2016).Outside these websites opinions vary but there does seem to be an increasing acceptance of the narrower circumscription of Blechnum e.g., Wilcox and Warden (2017), Heenan and McGlone (2019).…”