Oral Paper

         Floristics & Taxonomy

Insights into the taxonomic diversity of Viola subsection Borealiamericanae of the Eastern-North American Coastal Plain

Presenting Author
Remington Burwell
Description
The acaulescent blue violets have historically been a challenging group taxonomically due to debated species limits, unclear variation patterns, the extensive evidence of hybridization, and high allopolyploid lineage origin. Recently, the Ballard lab has placed the 40-plus currently recognized taxa in nine informal species groups on morphological and ecological grounds. To delineate species, the Ballard lab has adopted a population-level integrative approach using multiple lines of evidence, including microsatellites or (more recently) high-throughput sequencing (GBS), macromorphological and micromorphological studies of herbarium specimens and garden-cultivated wild plants, reproductive behavior from common garden studies, species distribution modeling, and niche analysis using soil samples. These integrative taxonomic studies currently focus on the Affinis and Edulis species groups, previously treated to include 1-5 and 0-2 species, respectively. Questions to be answered by these new investigations include the following. How many species are there in the two groups, and how do they differ? Are specific anomalous taxa undescribed species? What is the appropriate conservation status of narrowly distributed taxa? Recent evidence from living plants in a common garden and herbarium collections suggests as many as 12 distinct evolutionary species in the two groups combined, with two undescribed species.