Rotala belgaumensis sp. nov. (Lythraceae) from western Ghats, India

Abstract

During a floristic survey in the Belgaum district, Karnataka state, some specimens of Rotala L. were collected from a lateritic plateau in western Ghats, India. The specimens did not match with any previously described species of Rotala, but closely resembled R. macrandra Koehne and R. rosea (Poir.) C. D. K. Cook ex H. Hara in their exserted stamens and styles. The new species is described and illustrated here as Rotala belgaumensis S. R. Yadav, Malpure & Chandore.

Rotala sahyadricasp. nov. (Lythraceae) from Western Ghats, India

“…Th e genus Rotala L. was earlier represented by ca 44 species, distributed mostly in tropical and subtropical regions of the world (Cook 1979, 1996, Mabberley 2008. After Cook ' s revision in 1979, 11 species have been added to the genus by various workers (Lu 1979, Joseph and Sivarajan 1988, 1989, Bamps 1989, Beesley 1990, Mathew and Lakshminarasimhan 1990, Pradeep et al 1990, Yadav et al 2010, Prasad et al 2012, Sunil et al 2013, Prasad and Raveendran 2013. However, Almeida (1998) reduced one species to the rank of variety.…”

Rotala tulunadensis sp. nov. (Lythraceae) from Kerala, India

“…In 1989, Joseph and Sivarajan revised the genus for Peninsular India and reported 16 species. Later floristic explorations in India have resulted in the addition of three more species, namely R. malabarica (Pradeep et al 1990), R. andamanensis (Mathew and Lakshminarasimhan 1990) and R. belgaumensis (Yadav et al 2010). Rotala is thus represented by 24 species in India, of which 20 are from peninsular India.…”

Editorial

“…The largest country in the region, both in terms of geography and ongoing research is undoubtedly China and naturally enough this is also reflected in the number of published articles (Häkkinen and Wang 2008a,b, Jin et al 2008, 2009a,b, Yi et al 2008, Zhang et al 2008, 2009, Bi et al 2009, 2010,Chen et al 2009a, 2009b, 2010, Dong et al 2009a,b, Jin 2009, Liu et al 2009, Yang et al 2009, Xia and Li 2009, Weng et al 2009, Cong et al 2010, Guo et al 2010, He et al 2010, Xu et al 2010, Wang et al 2010, Wei and Wang 2010). Second largest is India with 11 recent contributions (Banik and Sanjappa 2008, Baruah and Nath 2008, Raole and Desai 2008, Viswanathan and Manikandan 2009, Kandwal and Gupta 2010, Karthigeyan et al 2010a,b, Pusalkar and Singh 2010, Sujanapal and Sasidharan 2010, Tandyekkal and Mohanan 2010, Yadav et al 2010), but we have also published numerous significant contributions to our knowledge of the plant biodiversity of southeastern‐most Asia, i.e. Vietnam (Orel and Wilson 2010, Trân et al 2010, Trân and Leong‐Skorniková 2010, Vu and Xia 2010), Thailand (Ngamriabsakul 2008), the Indonesian–Malesian region (Turner and Saunders 2008, Vermeulen 2008, Tang et al 2010, Turner 2009, 2010,) and Oceania (Wilmot‐Dear and Friis 2010).…”