On 13 September 2012, scientists from around the world came to Kew to celebrate the completion of the Flora of Tropical East Africa (FTEA). The event was marked by publication of the final part and a symposium with talks by contributors from Ethiopia, Kenya, the UK, the USA, Sweden and Uganda.

The FTEA project started in 1948. The East African Herbarium in Nairobi was built to house the plant specimens collected, and during the project many botanists were trained in field collecting techniques and in writing taxonomic family treatments. The first part appeared in 1952 and another 263 followed. These treat a total of 12,104 species, making FTEA the largest modern tropical Flora ever completed.

RBG Kew has a long tradition of co-ordinating Floras, being responsible for Flora Australiensis (1863–1878; 8,125 species), the Flora of the British West Indian Islands (1864; 3,409 species), the Flora of Tropical Africa (1868–1933; 13,500 species), the Flora of British India (1872–1897; 15,900 species), the Flora of Mauritius and the Seychelles (1877; 869 species), Flora Capensis (1896–1933; 11,705 species), the Flora of West Tropical Africa (2nd ed., 1954–1972; 7,349 species) and the Flora of Cyprus (1977–1985; 1,682 species). Still in progress are Flora Zambesiaca (started 1960; 10,000 species) and Flora of Iraq

Kew ScientistISSN: 0967-8018

Autumn 2012 Issue 42

www.kew.org

News from The Living Col lect ions, The Herbarium and The Laboratories at Kew & Wakehurst P lace

Aneilema brenanii (Commelinaceae) photographed in Kenya.

H.Beentje

RBG K

ew

RBG K

ew

Richard Deverell appointed as Director of RBG Kew

Flora of Tropical East Africa completed

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(started 1966, restarted 2010; 3,300 species). Taking overlap of species distributions into consideration, these Floras provide descriptions of some 60,000 species, or 20% of known plant species. This represents a major contribution to the requirement of the Convention on Biological Diversity to have a World Flora online by 2020.

Delegates at the symposium celebrated the accomplishments of FTEA, but had an eye on the future as well. Discussions were held on future directions in Flora production, strategies for working together on Flora spinoff products, and collaborations on basic science, fieldwork and conservation.

Contact: Dr Henk Beentje (h.beentje@kew.org)

• FTEAtreats11,657speciesofangiosperms(of which 2,820 are monocotyledons), 436 pteridophytes and 11 gymnosperms.

• 2,455speciesareendemictotheFTEAarea(Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania); another 344 are mostly restricted to the area.

• 1,679newspeciesweredescribedfromtheFTEA area during the project – 14 % of the entire flora.

Richard Deverell succeeded Professor Stephen Hopper as Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, on 17 September 2012. Richard joined Kew after nearly 20 years at the BBC where he achieved great success leading and managing new initiatives in such important areas as BBC News, where he ran the news and sport websites, and BBC Children’s programmes, where he was responsible for CBBC and CBeebies. He was also the Chief Operating Officer for BBC North and thus contributed to the delivery of one of the BBC’s most important new capital projects – the creation of Media City in Salford. Richard is familiar with the challenges and opportunities facing RBG Kew as a result of his six years as a trustee between 2003 and 2009 during which time, amongst other things, he chaired the Board Audit Committee.

Delegates at the FTEA symposium celebrate its completion.

DirectionScience at Kew

I am delighted and honoured to have started in September as Director at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Kew is a complex organisation with

many diverse facets. It runs two beautiful and popular gardens, it has incredible collections of plants and fungi (both living and preserved), it owns wonderful archives of botanical art and books, it operates a network of partnerships around the UK and globally and it maintains magnificent heritage buildings and monuments.

However, unarguably, Kew’s historic foundation is its science. It started as a royal scientific collection of rare and medicinal plants in the mid-18th Century. These collections were studied and expanded by often heroic Victorian plant collectors taking great personal risks to bring to England exotic and gorgeous plants from some chilly Himalayan pass or steamy jungle.

Today, Kew is known as much for its genetic work and seed-banking as it is for its plant and fungal collections. The organisation has gained expertise in diverse areas, from the germination and micro-propagation of threatened species through to unravelling the secrets of plant evolution. As we face the challenges of habitat loss and a changing climate, Kew’s science is more relevant than ever before, helping to provide plant-based solutions and essential expertise.

Kew’s science hinges around the Herbarium, the Jodrell Laboratory and the Seed Conservation Department, and the impact of the work carried out is truly global. For example, the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership encompasses over 100 institutions in 54 countries, and this will undoubtedly increase. Kew is a world-leader in so many ways and continues to evolve, embracing new technologies to widen our reach and impact, as in the web-based taxonomy of the eMonocots project. We are also fortunate in that we have the ability to engage and inspire the public through the stories we can tell about our science.

What is clear to me is that the scientific collections, combined with the quality, originality and global impact of science at Kew, are what make it unique. I am committed to supporting Kew’s world-class science and I am determined that on my watch, it will not only continue but flourish.

Richard Deverell, Director

Honours for Kew staff

Changing mutualismIntimate partnerships between fungi and plants were required for plants to colonise land for the first time, and these partnerships are still essential today for the establishment and growth of most terrestrial plants. Plants pay in carbon for fungi to scavenge minerals from poor soils. Research supported by the Natural Environment Research Council, undertaken in a collaboration between molecular ecologist Martin Bidartondo (Kew/Imperial) and physiological ecologists at Sheffield University, indicates that the balance of trade with fungi in ancient and modern plant lineages changes from low to high efficiency. This corresponds with the drastic changes to the Earth’s atmosphere and soils caused by the global success of plant-fungal partnerships. Nature Communications 3, 835 (2012).Contact: Dr Martin Bidartondo (m.bidartondo@kew.org)

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Fungal coils and branches within a plant cell.

Germination of alpines Millennium Seed Bank Partnership scientists at the Lombardy Seed Bank (University of Pavia, Italy) and Wakehurst Place (RBG Kew) are engaged in studies to understand better the impact of climate warming on the reproductive success of alpine plants. The phenology of seed germination in eight alpine species has been investigated by simulating monthly changes in temperature recorded at the glacial foreland and at an elevation 400 m lower to reflect the temperatures these plants would face if the climate warmed by 2.6°C (a conservative estimate of the likely increase in temperature during the 21st century). Previous studies have tended to focus on the effect on germination of warmer springs and summers because most alpine plants are adapted for spring germination. This study focused on the impact of warmer autumns and revealed for the first time that climate warming may result in a shift from spring to autumn germination. This shift means that seedlings could be more vulnerable to frost damage during the winter and may explain why plant populations tend to migrate upwards as the climate warms. As conditions at the leading edge become more favourable for seedling recruitment and survival, conditions at the trailing edge become less so. Current experiments monitoring seedling emergence and mortality in the field will test this hypothesis. Ann. Bot. 110, 155 (2012).Contact: Dr Robin Probert (r.probert@kew.org)

J.G. D

uckett

In June 2012, the services of two RBG Kew staff members were recognised in The Queen’s Birthday Honours Lists. Professor Stephen Hopper, former Director of RBG Kew, was appointed a ‘Companion of the Order of Australia’ within the Australian Honours System. In the UK Honours List, Madeleine Groves from the Conventions and Policy Section was awarded an MBE for ‘services to the protection of flora’.

Effects of climate change

Andrea Mondoni monitoring seedling emergence at 2,500 m in the moraine of the glacier Dosdè,

Lombardy Alps, Italy.

Biogeography

PalmsA series of papers has established a general framework for the biogeographical evolution of palms. In companion papers in the Journal of Biogeography, Bill Baker (Kew) and Thomas Couvreur (IRD, Montpellier) present a dated phylogenetic analysis of all palm genera with ancestral area reconstructions and detailed diversification analyses. They provide the first methodologically rigorous hypothesis for the evolution of palms in space and time, highlighting the Cretaceous crown node radiation of the family (ca. 100 Ma) in Laurasia and the role of long-distance dispersal as a major mechanism underpinning their global distribution. Their diversification studies suggest that the low species diversity of palms in Africa (65 species) relative to other regions is explained by increased in situ diversification in Asia, the Americas, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, rather than Neogene extinctions in Africa as suggested by other authors.

This framework was used to analyse the phylogenetic foundations of palm distributions across Malesia for a paper in the book Biotic evolution and environmental change in Southeast Asia. In a further study led by Aarhus University, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, the dated phylogenetic tree was used in conjunction with geographical data for all palm species to explore the phylogenetic structure of

palm assemblages worldwide and the imprints of historical processes in the resultant patterns. The results highlight the role of continental isolation, climate change and habitat loss throughout the Cenozoic for plant evolution in the Tropics. J. Biogeogr., in press, doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2699.2012.02794.x & 2795.x; Biotic evolution and environmental change in Southeast Asia (eds. Gower et al.), Cambridge. Univ. Press p 165 (2012); Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 109, 7379 (2012).

Contact: Dr Bill Baker (w.baker@kew.org)

A study, led by Kew researchers in collaboration with colleagues from the Missouri Botanical Garden (USA), the South African National Biodiversity Institute and the Shivaji University (India), has shed new light on the establishment and dynamics of the flora of two Mediterranean-type ecosystems: the Mediterranean Basin and the Cape of South Africa. The researchers performed a case study using Asparagaceae subfamily Scilloideae (hyacinths), a group that harbours a similar number of species in these two areas. They found that the contrasting biogeographical patterns in the two regions were shaped largely by past climate change and palaeogeography since the origin of the Old World members of the group in sub-Saharan Africa at the Palaeocene-Eocene boundary.

Whereas Cape diversity has been greatly influenced by its relationship with sub-Saharan Africa throughout the history of the subfamily, the Mediterranean Basin had no connection with the latter after the onset of the Mediterranean climate in the region and the aridification of the Sahara. The Mediterranean Basin subsequently contributed significantly to the diversity of neighbouring areas, whereas the Cape can be seen as a biogeographical cul-de-sac, with only a few dispersals towards sub-Saharan Africa. The Kew team is currently applying the framework developed with Scilloideae to other groups to understand further the evolutionary history of these two important repositories of biodiversity. PLoS ONE 7, e39377 (2012).

Contact: Dr Sven Buerki (s.buerki@kew.org)

Mediterranean-type ecosystems

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Bismarckia nobilis

F. Forest

G. Stafford

W. Baker

Mediterranean-type ecosystem in the Cape of South Africa.

Herbal medicine: an evolutionary viewThere is often scepticism surrounding traditional herbal treatments, partly due to scarcity of large-scale evidence of efficacy of traditional medicine. A team of researchers from Kew, the University of Reading, Imperial College London and RBG Edinburgh, in collaboration with colleagues from Nepal and New Zealand, conducted a phylogenetic study that provides support for herbal remedies. The researchers constructed a genus-level family tree representing 20,000 plant species found in three disparate regions (Nepal, New Zealand and the Cape of South Africa) in order to compare medicinal plants used in these geographical areas. They found that plants traditionally used to treat similar health conditions came from the same plant clusters across the three floras. These shared phylogenetic patterns in traditional herbal medicine were interpreted as independent discovery of efficacy in these plant groups. This was supported by the finding that many plants used to produce drugs come from these clusters highlighted by traditional knowledge, suggesting that plant bioactivity underlies traditional use. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 109, 15835 (2012).

Contact: Dr Haris Saslis-Lagoudakis (h.saslis-lagoudakis@kew.org)

Trees of UgandaA new book, Conservation Checklist of the Trees of Uganda (by J. Kalema & H. Beentje; Kew Publishing, 2012; ISBN 9781842463772; £40), provides names, synonomy and conservation assessments for over 800 tree species of Uganda. ‘Vulnerable’ species are each given a full-page treatment that includes a description, illustration, distribution map, graph on flowering/fruiting times and notes on threats and habitat. This is the first publication of its kind for Uganda.

www.kewbooks.com

Medicinal plant trader in KwaZulu-

Natal, South Africa.

Andrew

McRobb/RBG

Kew

ICRA

F

Botanic gardens on six continents signed an historic agreement on 23 May 2012. Responding to a United Nations target to restore at least 15 percent of the world’s damaged ecosystems by 2020, the following institutions have agreed to work together to form the new Ecological Restoration Alliance: RBG Kew, RBG Edinburgh, The Eden Project (UK), Kings Park and Botanic Garden (Australia), RBG Canada, National Tropical Botanical Garden (USA), Missouri Botanical Garden, Brackenhurst Botanic Garden (Kenya), Rio de Janeiro Botanic Garden, Jardín Botánico Francisco Javier Clavijero (Mexico), RBG Jordan, Korea National Arboretum, South China Botanical Garden and Botanic Gardens Conservation International. Other botanical gardens in China, South Africa, UK, USA and Venezuela are committed to joining or supporting the Alliance.

The Alliance has ambitious aims, with a plan to restore 100 damaged, degraded or destroyed ecosystems. Restoration

projects will draw on the proven restoration knowledge, capacity and experience of the allied botanic gardens, arboreta and seed banks. The places to be targeted include tropical forests, prairies, wild places within cities, wetlands and coastal sites – ecosystems that are under threat and no longer able to provide essential services and resources for sustaining human livelihoods and biodiversity.

The first funding for an Ecological Restoration Alliance project has been granted by the Ashden Trust (a Sainsbury Family Charitable Trust focusing on climate change, sustainable development, or improving the quality of life in poorer communities). They are supporting a three-year project that unites Brackenhurst and Tooro gardens to conserve endangered tree species and restore upland forests in Kenya and Uganda, respectively. A feature of the project, coordinated by BGCI, will be to engage the private sector so as to share findings and promote the reintroduction of endangered species in degraded ecosystems, such as selectively logged forests. A similar project is now being planned for Latin America, with Kew joining three other gardens to improve watersheds with native tree species. Cons. Biol. 25, 265 (2011)

Contact: Dr Bruce Pavlik (b.pavlik@kew.org)

Left: Directors of botanical gardens and BGCI signing the Ecological Restoration Alliance MoU at Kew. Left to right: Andrew Vovides (Clavijero), Guido Gelli (Rio), Stephen Hopper (Kew), Mark Nicholson (Brackenhurst), Sara Oldfield (BGCI) and Mark Webb (Kings Park).

Below: Delegates at a forestry workshop in Nairobi propose the Forest Landscape Africa consortium.

A technical consortium, Forest Landscape Africa, has been proposed by delegates at a workshop organised by the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership (MSBP), held at the World Agroforestry Centre (Nairobi; Dec 2011). The workshop assessed constraints and opportunities for public sector forestry in Africa in addressing issues such as deforestation, food security and climate change. It was attended by forestry institute representatives from eleven African countries, the World Agro-forestry Centre (ICRAF), FAO (Forestry Department), Forest & Landscape Denmark, UNEP, DFID and others. Forest Landscape Africa builds on decades of bilateral relationships and creates opportunities to address technical constraints in large-scale afforestation for ecosystem services, carbon capture, biodiversity offsets and sustainable livelihoods. The MSBP currently stores seed collections from over 10,200 woody species.

Contact: Dr Moctar Sacande (m.sacande@kew.org)

Partnerships for restoration

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Global restoration initiative

Georgian plants propagation

Wildflower seed quality

Forest Landscape Africa

Seed scientists and horticulturists from Kew and the National Botanic Garden of Georgia are developing propagation protocols for five highly threatened Georgian plants that have proved problematic to grow from seed, particularly stored seed. Cyclamen colchicum, Galanthus kemulariae, Campanula kachethica, Pulsatilla georgica and Paeonia steveniana are known from just a few sites and populations are declining. The protocols will provide a foundation for any future activities to re-introduce the species to historical sites.

Contact: Clare Trivedi (c.trivedi@kew.org)

Wildflower seed supplied by five commercial producers has been found to vary in quantity and quality. This has implications for consumers wishing to use seed to establish wildflowers on their property. The study, conducted by the UK Native Seed Hub (UKNSH) at Wakehurst Place, found all but one single-species packets tested were correctly named, but descriptions of species present in mixed packets were frequently inaccurate. Both single and mixed-species packets varied considerably in their germinability and storage moisture. The results, presented at the 8th European Conference on Ecological Restoration ( eské Budéjovice; 9-14 September 2012), provide further evidence that technical assistance provided by the UKNSH can support native seed production and ensure high-quality seed is available for conservation projects in the UK. The UKNSH is funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.

Contact: Ted Chapman (t.chapman@kew.org)

B. Pavlik

A 10 year-old, species-rich upland forest restored at Brackenhurst Botanic Garden, Kenya.

Joel Rowlands separating seed from a commercial wildflower mix.

The GeoCAT map editor, illustrating multiple data sources and the metadata window allowing users to view the underlying data for each point.

eMonocot is a distributed system of online biodiversity information resources for monocotyledons. A new portal for eMonocot aggregates these resources providing identification resources and information across all monocot plant families. A beta version of the portal became publicly available in October 2012 and already provides taxon pages for the ca. 70,000 species accepted by the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families, interactive multi-access keys and image galleries. Further content, functionality and improvements will be added over the next 12 months. The project is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, via a consortium grant to RBG Kew, Oxford University and the Natural History Museum. www.emonocot.org

Kew’s Archive Catalogue was made available on-line in April 2012. About 40 collections (2,500 records) of individuals have been added so far, including the papers of Sir William and Sir Joseph Hooker, Sir Joseph Banks and Marianne North. This represents about 10% of the total holdings. www.calmview.eu/kew/calmview/

The complete catalogue of the 85,000 specimens in Kew’s Economic Botany Collection was made available on-line in May 2012. The Economic Botany Collection covers plant raw materials and artefacts from around the world, dating from ancient Egyptian times to the present. It is a rich resource for subjects such as history, anthropology, plant taxonomy and conservation, chemistry and DNA, and is a key repository for Kew’s history.

http://apps.kew.org/ecbot/search

Following long-term research by Nicholas Hind (Kew), a new web resource is now available on the 19th century botanist and traveller, George Gardner. This provides a transcription of Kew’s manuscript copy of his Catalogue of Brazilian Plants, a database of his collections (based on the Catalogue, the Hiern list of determinations of the collections at the Natural History Museum and Kew, and current determinations sourced through virtual herbaria and determinations lists), a diary of Gardner’s travel itinerary (with reference to his account in Travels in the Interior of Brazil), a digital copy of the Medicinal & Economical plants ... from his Catalogue, a list of published references connected with his itinerary, and a near-exhaustive list of references on, by or concerning George Gardner and his collections.

www.kew.org/science/tropamerica/gardner/

New web resources

GeoCAT – a tool for rapid Red List assessmentsThe GIS Unit at Kew has released a new online tool to help with Red List assessments. GeoCAT (the Geospatial Conservation Assessment Tool) is designed to produce rapid species-level conservation assessments based on IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria. GeoCAT is an update from the Conservation Assessment Tools (CAT) extension for ArcView GIS released previously (see Kew Scientist issue 33; April 2008). The updated tool is now web-based and is freely available at http://geocat.kew.org/ making it more accessible to Kew’s partners and collaborators around the world. The tool

also uses the Google Maps environment making it familiar and easy to use. A powerful extension of the tool is a link to the specimen data repository of GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), giving access to millions of data points supplied by institutions across the world. The tool uses specimen or observation data to calculate a preliminary assessment based on geographical measures used in the IUCN criteria. GeoCAT is a first step toward streamlining the Red List process.

Contact: Steve Bachman (s.bachman@kew.org)

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eMonocot portal

Kew Archives

Economic Botany Collection

George Gardner

G. P. G

iusso

Threatened plants100 most threatenedOf the 25 plants listed in Priceless or Worthless, a list of the 100 most threatened animals, plants and fungi (IUCN/ZSL; Sept. 2012), Kew botanists were involved with the description of three: Dendrophylax fawcettii, Erythrina schliebenii and Tahina spectabilis. In 1971, former Kew botanist Bernard Verdourt described the legume E. schliebenii in FTEA from the only known collections made at a single site in Tanzania in the 1930s. The species was considered ‘Extinct’ following clearance of the site for agriculture, but it was rediscovered in a hitherto unknown coastal forest near Kilwa in 2001, and re-collected in 2011. At Kew these collections were compared with existing material. Fewer than 50 individuals survive. J. East African Nat. Hist. 100, 133 (2011). Contact: Dr Barbara Mackinder (b.mackinder@kew.org)

New most threatened orchid?Ornithochilus cacharensis, a new species of orchid from Assam (India) described by botanists from India and Kew, was published too late to be consideration for the top 100 most threatened list. It may well be a candidate as only one individual has so far been discovered. The species has attractive bright red-purple flowers and is related to the moth orchids (Phalaenopsis species) that are widely grown as house plants. Kew Bull. 67, 1 (2012).Contact: André Schuiteman (a.schuiteman@kew.org)

Mediterranean seeds

The flora of the islands in the Mediterranean is rich in endemic species, with many restricted to individual islands, and requires urgent conservation measures. An initiative ‘Ensuring the survival of endangered plants in the Mediterranean’, led by Kew and six conservation organizations from Crete, Corsica, Cyprus, Mallorca, Sardinia, and Sicily, began in October 2011 to ensure the survival of 900 plant species in six Mediterranean islands through ex situ conservation measures. During the first year, seeds were collected from 434 taxa, mostly endemic, rare, threatened or protected. The seeds were stored in local seed bank facilities of the six islands with back-up collections at the Millennium Seed Bank. A workshop will take place in the Orto Botanico di Catania (Sicily) on 18–20 April 2013. The project is funded mainly by the MAVA Foundation with the support of other co-funders, like Obra Social Sa Nostra (Balearic Islands) and the University of Cagliari. Contact: Teresa Gil Gil (teresa.gilgil@kew.org) www.medislandplant.eu/

Saponaria sicula

Towards monophylyOrchid community agree name changes in OncidiumThe monumental Genera Orchidacearum series depends on extensive analyses of DNA sequence data to provide guidance about how to classify orchids in an appropriate manner. A recent paper in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society is a good example of the scale and impact of such studies.

The dataset collected included five DNA regions and 736 accessions (590 species) covering 98% of the genera ascribed to the subtribe Oncidiinae (Neotropical; 1600 species). The results demonstrated that Oncidium, the largest genus of the subtribe, was polyphyletic. This result was due to multiple parallel shifts in pollination to oil-collecting bees from other sorts of pollination systems. These species all mimic yellow-flowered members of the family Malpighiaceae and have a unique absorbance in the UV-green range.

As these results required substantial rearrangements of generic boundaries in this group of horticulturally significant taxa, the proposed changes were reviewed by the Royal Horticultural Society’s taxonomy subcommittee of the Orchid Committee. After taking submissions from people supporting and opposing these changes, the subcommittee voted to support the changes proposed in Genera Orchidacearum, and these are now taken up by the Royal Horticultural Society system, the World Checklist of Monocots (produced at RBG Kew and used in the RBG Kew living collections and other databases) and the American Orchid Society. This is an example of how there is now a formal system of recognised taxonomy in many areas of science and horticulture. Bot. J. Linn. Soc. 168, 117 (2012).

Contact: Prof. Mark Chase (m.chase@kew.org)

Guatteria species (Annonaceae).

Oncidium fuscatum

M.S.V

orontsova

P. Gasson

M. C

hase

Classifications are constantly changing to keep up to date with increasing knowledge. We are currently in a period of faster change as plant classification is realigned into monophyletic groups following the widespread availability of DNA sequence data. But how many species change their name as a classification is updated?

It has not been possible to quantify this up to now, but name database projects in the grasses (Poaceae) have enabled a direct comparison between a ‘traditional’ classification system and a ‘phylogenetic’ one. GrassBase (www.kew.org/data/grassbase/) contains a list of all species of Poaceae as they were classified in 1986. GrassWorld (http://grassworld.myspecies.info) is a copy of GrassBase updated to incorporate

Annonaceae (with ca. 2,400 species in 108 genera) are the largest family of Magnoliales. In spite of their great floristic importance and the long-standing interest in their systematics, no authoritative classification had been published in light of recent molecular phylogenetic analyses. For a special issue of the Botanical Journal of the Linnean

Society on Annonaceae, an international team of researchers compiled the largest, most representative, molecular dataset on Annonaceae and presented a corresponding classification. The authors analysed DNA sequences of up to eight plastid markers from 193 members of Annonaceae plus outgroups and found that the family was composed of four major clades, which they give the rank of subfamily: Annonoideae (with amended circumscription) and three new subfamilies Anaxagoreoideae, Ambavioideae and Malmeoideae. In Annonoideae, seven tribes are recognized, one of which is described as new. In Malmeoideae, seven tribes are recognized, six of which are newly described. Monophyly is the only characteristic that the subfamilies have in common, and currently it is challenging to identify diagnostic morphological characters, although many characters await evaluation. Bot. J. Linn. Soc. 169, 5 (2012).

Contact: Prof. Mark Chase (m.chase@kew.org)

conclusions from all published phylogenetic reconstructions. Out of 11,500 accepted grass species, 1,179 (about 10%) have been moved to a different genus to follow monophyletic groups. Of course the classification is still changing, and some parts of the grass family are more thoroughly studied than others. A subset of species in the well known tribes Paniceae and Paspaleae was also analysed. Out of 2,070 species in Paniceae and Paspaleae, 362 (17%) moved to a different genus. If other plant families are similar to the grasses, then the transition from a traditional to a phylogenetic classification system is expected to lead to name changes in around 10-20% of species. Taxon 61, 735 (2012).

Contact: Dr Maria Vorontsova (m.vorontsova@kew.org)

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The name of Pennisetum advena Wipff & Veldkamp in the traditional classification has been changed to Cenchrus advena (Wipff & Veldkamp) Morrone in the phylogenetic classification.

One in five plant species to be renamed?

Classification of Annonaceae

Legume Phylogeny Working GroupThe recently-formed international Legume Phylogeny Working Group (LPWG) is working towards a phylogenetic classification of the family. New phylogenetic analyses have been carried out by the ‘Arizona’ group of the LPWG (Martin Wojciechowski, Michael Sanderson, Shelley McMahon and Kelly Steele). An overview paper arising from the legume symposium at the 2011 International Botanical Congress in Melbourne that focused on these analyses has been submitted to Taxon. The paper outlines where we are along the road to understanding phylogenetic relationships across legumes and therefore how far there is to go before a new phylogenetically based classification might be proposed. This paper will be published under LPWG authorship.

Contact: Dr Gwilym Lewis (g.lewis@kew.org)

Convergent evolution of papilionate flowersThe legumes and milkworts (Polygalaceae) both include many species with pea-like (papilionate or keeled) flowers. Both families belong in the angiosperm order Fabales, together with two relatively small families, Quillajaceae and Surianaceae. In collaborative research between Kew and the University of Reading, Paula Rudall, Angélica Bello and Julie Hawkins used a combination of molecular and morphological data to investigate the relationships between these four families, providing a framework to explore the evolution of the unusual papilionate flower morphology. The results showed that the flower morphologies of legumes and milkworts are convergent, despite several remarkable similarities between them. In its diverse forms, the papilionate flower represents an adaptive syndrome in which the pollination organs are completely hidden prior to mechanical release by a pollinating insect. Cladistics 28, 393 (2012).

Contact: Dr Paula Rudall (p.rudall@kew.org) Lonchocarpus phylogenyMolecular and morphological analyses of Lonchocarpus s.l. have been published in Taxon and demonstrated that the genus, as traditionally circumscribed, is polyphyletic and that three well-supported clades can be referred to Lonchocarpus s.s., Dahlstedtia and Muellera. These three genera have been recircumscribed and Dahlstedtia has increased in size from two to 16 species, and Muellera from two to 32 species (including additional new combinations published by M. Sousa in a more recent work). The two monospecific genera Bergeronia and Margaritolobium are synonymised under Muellera.

The molecular results reveal that Lonchocarpus s.s. originated about 8.7 Ma in Central America, whereas Dahlstedtia and Muellera both arose in South America, 6.3 Ma and 8 Ma, respectively. At least three migration events of Lonchocarpus have occurred from Central to South America and one to Africa. Taxon, 61, 93 (2012).

Contact: Dr Gwilym Lewis (g.lewis@kew.org)

FZ Leguminosae completedThe final Part 4 of the seven-part Volume 3 (Leguminosae) for Flora Zambesiaca was published in October 2012. In the part, Brian Schrire treats Cyamopsis (3 spp.), Indigastrum (2 spp. + 3 infrasp.), Microcharis (11 spp.), Rhynchotropis (2 spp.) and Indigofera (160 spp. + 29 infrasp.), describing one new subsection, 10 new species and 11 new infraspecific taxa.

Contact: Dr Brian Schrire (b.schrire@kew.org)

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Scanning electron micrograph of dissected flower bud of Polygala violacea.

RBG K

ew

J. Wieringa

West Central Africa is the area of greatest biodiversity within tropical Africa where legumes are the dominant flowering plant family both in terms of species richness and ecological importance. Efforts to conserve biodiversity, based on the herbarium collections at RBG Kew and in other international herbaria, are multifaceted. Baseline diversity taxonomic research papers continue to be published. In 2012, four new legume tree species (Gilbertiodendron newberyi, G. tonkolili, Hymenostegia elegans and H. robusta) were described by Kew’s legume specialists and international co-authors. This work is complemented by studies using more recently developed methodologies such as the use of species distribution models (SDMs). A newly published study, led by

Manuel de la Estrella (Universidad de Córdoba, Spain), applied SDM methodology to a merged dataset of legume herbarium records from Cameroon (RBG Kew), Gabon (Wageningen University, Netherlands) and Equatorial Guinea (Real Jardín Botánico, Madrid). Legume species richness patterns in these countries were inferred from the full dataset, the conventional SDM approach, and additionally and innovatively in datasets partitioned according to five vegetation types. Consequently, the study was able to predict areas of potential species richness for conservation planning in Afromontane vegetation, coastal vegetation, non-flooded forest, open formations and riverine forest. PLoS ONE 7, e41526 (2012).

Contact: Dr Barbara Mackinder (b.mackinder@kew.org)

Legume diversity patterns in West Central Africa

Muellera obtusa in Bahia, Brazil.

G. Lew

is

Hymenostegia robusta, a new species of tropical legume tree recently described from Gabon.

Legumes

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Kew ScientistRoyal Botanic Gardens, Kew,Richmond, Surrey TW9 3AB.Tel: +44 (0)20 8332 5000Fax: +44 (0)20 8332 5310Internet: www.kew.org

Editorial advisory teamDr W. Baker, Dr C. Clennett, Dr C. Clubbe, Dr T. Entwisle, Dr F. Forest, P. Griffiths, Dr R. de Kok, Dr G. Lewis, N. McGough, M. Ramsay, N. Rothwell, Dr P. Rudall, Prof. M. Simmonds, Dr P. Toorop, R. Wilford

Editor Dr M. FayProduction Editor Dr G. KiteDesign Design & Photography, RBG Kew

Published in Spring and Autumn.

The phenolic composition of coffee (Coffea) leaves has been studied in detail in research led by Claudine Campa (IRD, Montpellier, France), with colleagues in France, Madagascar and the UK (Aaron Davis, Kew). Concentrations of hydroxycinnamic acid esters (HCEs) and mangiferin were measured for 23 species native to Africa or Madagascar. HCEs are commonly grouped under the generic name of chlorogenic acids; mangiferin, a C-glucosylxanthone, was first isolated from mangoes (Mangifera indica). Mangiferin content and tissue localization were compared in leaves and fruits of C. pseudozanguebariae, C. arabica (Arabica coffee) and C. canephora (robusta coffee). The study revealed that seven of the 23 species accumulated mangiferin in their leaves. Mangiferin leaf-accumulating species also contain mangiferin in the fruits, but only in the outer (sporophytic) parts and not in the coffee beans. Analyses of mangiferin and HCE content showed good agreement with coffee species delimitation and provided independent support for various coffee lineages, as proposed by molecular phylogenetic analyses. The potential health benefits of coffee-leaf tea (a ‘tea’ made from

Betel nut palm taxonomyFollowing the successful defence of his PhD, jointly supervised at Institut Pertanian Bogor, Herbarium Bogoriense (Indonesia) and Kew, Charlie Heatubun has published a monograph of the betel nut genus Areca in eastern Malesia. The account substantially reduces the number of species previously recognised in the region to five and also includes a treatment of the betel nut palm itself, Areca catechu. The wild distribution of this species is not known as it has been dispersed by humans due to its wide use as narcotic – an estimated 200–400 million people use betel nut as a stimulant globally. The new account of A. catechu clears up the complex nomenclature of the species, reducing many names into synonymy. In a second publication in Phytotaxa, Charlie described seven new species of Areca from the region to the west of Wallace’s line, including the endangered A. gurita, named using the Indonesian word for octopus due to its strange inflorescence morphology, and a new rheophytic species from Cambodia, A. riparia. Phytotaxa 28, 6 (2011); Bot. J. Linn. Soc. 168, 147 (2012).

Contact: Dr Bill Baker (w.baker@kew.org)

Molecular phylogenetic studies have confirmed the evolutionary origin of many hybrid Nicotiana species, but that of the allopolyploid section Suaveolentes has proved difficult to establish. Nicotiana section Suaveolentes is the largest group of polyploids within the genus and the only section to have a native range outside of the Americas. Scientists from Kew, Queen Mary (University of London) and the Natural History Museum (London) have used data from multiple regions of the plastid and nuclear genomes to reveal that past gene flow at the diploid level may explain why the parental progenitors of section Suaveolentes have been so difficult to identify. Although the section Sylvestres lineage was clearly identified as the paternal genome donor, the maternal genome appears to contain a mixture of genes from two different diploid sections suggesting that the donor was itself a hybrid or contained genes introgressed from another diploid species. Evolution, in press, doi:10.1111/j.1558-5646.2012.01748.x.

Contact: Dr Laura Kelly (l.kelly@kew.org)

Nicotiana origins

Colour is important to plants for various reasons. In leaves of some plants, bright coloration can signal a warning to herbivorous animals. Brightly coloured flowers can readily attract potential pollinators such as insects, and intense coloration in fruits can attract a bird or animal that could act as a dispersal agent. Colour that is pigment-based is sometimes enhanced by structural means to increase gloss or iridescence. For example, the blue colour of

fruits of Pollia condensata (Commelinaceae) is more intense than that of any previously described biological material. Using transmission electron microscopy at Kew combined with optical imaging and spectroscopy at Cambridge University, a recent study has demonstrated that the intense coloration in Pollia fruits is caused by helicoidally stacked cellulose microfibrils in the cell walls of the fruit wall. This particular type of structural colour has rarely been reported in plants, though it occurs relatively commonly in animals. Funded by the Leverhulme Trust and with input from international collaborators, a joint research programme is currently investigating the biological and physical bases of several different types of structural colour in plants. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 109, 15712 (2012).

Contact: Dr Paula Rudall (p.rudall@kew.org)

coffee leaves), and beverages and masticatory products made from the fleshy parts of coffee fruits, are supported by the phenolic quantification. Chlorogenic acids are powerful antioxidants and mangiferin has numerous pharmacological properties. Ann. Bot. 110, 595 (2012).

Contact: Dr Aaron Davis (a.davis@kew.org)

Stimulating Plants

The most intense colour blue in the plant kingdom?

Nicotiana cavicola (section Suaveolentes) growing on Mount Luke, Western Australia.

S. Hopper

RBG Kew

Intensely coloured blue fruits of Pollia condensata.

Samples of coffee-leaf tea in Kew’s Economic Botany Collection.

Chemistry of coffee-leaf tea