The genus Gymnospermium (Berberidaceae) in Italy: identity and relationships of the populations at the western limit of the genus range

Abstract

Gymnospermium is a small genus of 7-12 taxa subject to diverging taxonomic treatments and distributed from east China to the Balkans. The recent discovery of Gymnospermium in the S-Apennines posed questions about origin and identity. Accordingly, we performed a systematic investigation by means of morphological, karyological and molecular tools. All populations were diploid with 2n ¼ 14 as for the Balkan G. scipetarum (incl. G. maloi), and also morphology suggested a close affinity to the latter. However, the Italian populations differed from typical G. scipetarum by the lower stamen:petal length and style:carpel length. By including all European and most Asian taxa in a phylogenetic analysis, we shed new light into the species-level relationships in this genus. In the combined ITS-trnL-F phylogeny, two major clades were retrieved. One included the central Asian and eastern European taxa plus the Greek endemic G. peloponnesiacum sister to G. odessanum, and one the Balkan and Apennine populations. Such findings further corroborated that the Apennine plant belong to G. scipetarum. The native status of the Italian population is supported by exclusive SNPs in both ITS1 and trnL-F sequences. Along with morphological evidence, this allows to refer it to the new subspecies G. scipetarum subsp. eddae.

Trends in population size of Ophrys argolica subsp. biscutella in the Appennino Lucano-Val d'Agri-Lagonegrese National Park (Italy)

“…Botanists used to pay little attention to this sector in the southern Apennines. Only recently it has been thoroughly investigated (Fascetti et al, 2013;Rosati et al, 2017Rosati et al, , 2019a.…”

Anthyllis cytisoides L. (Fabaceae), new to the Italian native flora

“…Since the XIX century, numerous botanists have studied its diverse flora and vegetation, some of which in relatively recent times (Baldini 1995;Arrigoni and Di Tommaso 1997). As observed by Rosati et al (2019), however, this kind of findings in supposedly well-known territories show that field researches can still lead to significant progresses in our knowledge of the national floristic heritage, particularly rich in rare species, thus increasing the base of data for its long-term conservation.…”

Gymnospermium Altaicum (Pall.) Spach (Berberidaceae), an Early Spring Element of Wild Fruit Forests of the Trans-Ili Alatau

“…Takhtadzhyan [1], who noted that the independence of the genera was first adopted in the Flora Europea [2]. According to different authors, the size of the genus Gymnosperimium varies from 7 to 12 species distributed from Eastern China to the Balkans [3]. We provide a visual representation of the distribution range of the genus Gymnospermium (Fig.…”