Annotated systematic checklist of the Compositae of Bolivia

Amongst the Andean countries, Bolivia clearly stands out as having a relatively poorly known flora and, until January 2015, no current checklist. The first complete listing of the known ferns and flowering plants of Bolivia was Foster’s Catalogue of the Ferns and Flowering Plants of Bolivia (1958). Clearly a modern annotated checklist of the Compositae (the daisy/sunflower family) – as a precursor to a Flora account – is highly desirable. The project was developed in order to address this continuing need.

An updated, synonymized Preliminary Annotated Checklist of the Compositae of Bolivia (Vers. 2) is now available online. The Checklist is based on Foster’s Catalogue and subsequent (continuing) literature survey, together with additional herbarium work undertaken whilst naming many recent J.R.I. Wood collections. It does not yet represent a complete survey of specimens in the herbarium collections. Currently, 13 tribes are represented by about 1,100 species in 236 genera with an estimated 308 endemic species, which is equivalent to 28% endemism. Keys to tribes, genera, and in some cases taxa within genera, are provided. The list does not yet include cultivated taxa, a feature included within the recently published Catálogo de las Plantas Vasculares de Bolivia (Jørgensen et al. 2015); this information has since been added following a study visit to the Herbario Nacional, La Paz, to supplement the information from an earlier visit made in 2012.

Foster’s list has been considerably augmented using a number of accounts of collectors’ itineraries and determinations of their collections. The few available tribal revisions, with their accompanying nomenclators, have been abstracted, these providing confirmation of the presence of many taxa. Revisions and accounts of Bolivian plants, and papers on historical collections and types, have also been abstracted. Type citations are provided throughout and known locations of types provided, together with barcode/accession numbers where available. Commentary concerning the types, taxonomy and nomenclature are provided where relevant. The Checklist is supplemented by an extensive list of references.

Tribal, generic and species concepts are those currently accepted by the author (following a new arrangement of the Compositae in K). The fully cross-referenced list includes as complete a (global) synonymy of the accepted names as possible. To the list was added a number of names based on the determination of many hundreds of Compositae collections made over the last 15 years throughout the country by J.R.I. Wood et al. Geographical, ecological and phytosociological information, together with altitudinal ranges and flowering times, for as many taxa as possible is being provided. This is an ongoing process: the Checklist is now available in its second version and a further revision will be put up on-line soon.

The outputs of the project (e.g. descriptions of new taxa, resolutions of nomenclatural problems) are being published in peer-reviewed journals. Emendments and amendments are being made available to the International Plant Names Index, as all aspects of the publication of the names involved have been checked against the Code for validity and legitimacy. The results will eventually be fed into the Global Compositae Checklist (version 1 has already been made available), The Plant List, Target1 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation – Global Checklists and have already been used in Jørgensen et al.’s Catálogo de las Plantas Vasculares de Bolivia (2015) (based on the Checklist of [the Flora of] Bolivia).

Objectives

• An updated version of the PDF file will be made available later in 2016 and, it is hoped, this may take the form of an electronic publication.

Department

Accelerated Taxonomy

Project Leader

D.J. Nicholas Hind

Team

Susan M. (Sue) [née Brodie] Frisby

• An early version of the ‘Annotated Checklist’ is available as a PDF file and as a searchable HTML-based resource on the Kew website: Compositae of Bolivia.
• A later version of this file was made available to the Bolivian contributors of Jørgensen et al.’s Catálogo de Plantas Vasculares de Bolivia in 2012.
• The earlier version was widely used, and cited, by the contributors to the three Compositae volumes of the new Flora Argentina (published in 2014 and 2015).
• I have carried out two study visits to the Herbario Nacional, La Paz (LPB), and two similar stays in the Herbario del Oriente Boliviano, Museu Historial Natural Noel Kempff Mercado (USZ), Santa Cruz.
• I have also had four periods of fieldwork in Bolivia, having seen and collected many species in Cochabamba, La Paz, Santa Cruz and Tarija.
• I am steadily working through many hundreds of Compositae specimens collected by John I. R. Wood in Bolivia since the 1990s. Many new species have been described, together with several relevant papers, as the results of this research, and many more are in preparation.

Bolivia

• Herbario Nacional de Bolivia (LPB)
• Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, La Paz

RBG, Kew

Bentham-Moxon Trust