Sensitive phylogenetics ofClematisand its position in Ranunculaceae

Abstract

Ranunculaceae are a nearly cosmopolitan plant family with the highest diversity in northern temperate regions and with relatively few representatives in the tropics. As a result of their position among the early diverging eudicots and their horticultural value, the family is of great phylogenetic and taxonomic interest. Despite this, many genera remain poorly sampled in phylogenetic studies and taxonomic problems persist. In this study, we aim to clarify the infrageneric relationships of Clematis by greatly improving taxon sampling and including most of the relevant subgeneric and sectional types in a simultaneous dynamic optimization of phenotypic and molecular data. We also investigate how well the available data support the hypothesis of phylogenetic relationships in the family. At the family level, all five currently accepted subfamilies are resolved as monophyletic. Our analyses strongly imply that Anemone s.l. is a grade with respect to the Anemoclema + Clematis clade. This questions the recent sinking of well‐established genera, including Hepatica, Knowltonia and Pulsatilla, into Anemone. In Clematis, 12 clades conceptually matching the proposed sectional division of the genus were found. The taxonomic composition of these clades often disagrees with previous classifications. Phylogenetic relationships between the section‐level clades remain highly unstable and poorly supported and, although some patterns are emerging, none of the proposed subgenera is in evidence. The traditionally recognized and horticulturally significant section Viorna is both nomenclaturally invalid and phylogenetically unsupported. Several other commonly used sections are likewise unjustified. Our results provide a phylogenetic background for a natural section‐level classification of Clematis.

Phylogenetic reassessment of tribe Anemoneae (Ranunculaceae): Non-monophyly of Anemone s.l. revealed by plastid datasets

“…eichleri formed a clade. Subsequent studies [20, 24, 37, 39] confirmed the result of Miikeda at al. [19] because they used same/similar dataset of Naravelia from GenBank, or sequenced the same species.…”

“…However, Wang’s treatment is supported by results of karyotype and molecular phylogenies [32, 37, 38]. Furthermore, it has been documented that Anemoclema is close to Clematis , not to Anemone [4, 38, 39]. Therefore, Anemoclema has been transferred to subtribe Clematidinae [38], then subtribe Anemoninae includes Anemone s.l.…”

“…However, the monophyly of Anemone s.l. was not resolved in other studies using other regions, but these were with limited samples [4, 39, 42]. In addition, phylogenetic relationship between subtribes Anemoninae and Clematidinae is inferred just using nrITS and atpB-rcbL datasets [24, 38, 41].…”

Clematis mae (Ranunculaceae), a new species of C. sect. Meclatis from Xinjiang, China

“…Clematis L. is one of the three most widely distributed genera in Ranunculaceae (the other two being Anemone L. and Ranunculus L.; Ziman and Keener 1989), with approximately 300 species (Fang et al 1980, Tamura 1987, 1995, Essig 1991, Johnson 1997, Grey-Wilson 2000, Wang and Li 2005, Miikeda et al 2006, Xie et al 2011, Lehtonen et al 2016, Jiang et al 2017. The taxonomy of Clematis has attracted much attention due to its great horticultural value.…”

Towards stable classifications

“…Bone, Cribb & Buerki, ; Chase et al ., ). Finally, in this issue, we present papers on fungi and lichens (Auxier et al ., ; Widhelm et al ., ), Alismatales (Platonova et al ., ; Volkova et al ., ), Amaryllidaceae (Souza et al ., ), Ranunculaceae (Lehtonen, Christenhusz & Falck, ), Malvales (Aubriot, Singh & Knapp, 2016b; Aubriot et al ., 2016b) and Malpighiales (Ghislain et al ., ). These and other similar papers are leading towards ever more stable classifications.…”