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Morphometric analysis of the Habenaria parviflora complex (Orchidaceae)

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Abstract

We analyzed patterns of morphological differentiation of the Habenaria parviflora complex (Orchidaceae), through morphometric analyses of populations and morphotypes, aiming at evaluating current taxonomic proposals and at identifying discriminative characters for the delimitation of taxa. We performed multivariate and univariate morphometric analyses using 18 morphological characters of 675 individuals from 65 populations distributed throughout Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, representing 12 morphotypes that comprise nearly all the morphological diversity and geographic distribution of the complex. The group presents morphological patterns difficult to understand which suggest that the complex does not correspond to a single species, nor does each morphotype correspond to a taxon. It was possible to clearly differentiate only two taxa, apart from H. parviflora, by a combination of characters: H. paulensis and H. ulei. Characters associated with flower size, leaf width and opening angle of the sepals were the most discriminatory for both species. The relationships between the populations of the remaining morphotypes exhibited high overlap in the analyses, making it impossible to define morphological groups with the characters used. The number of flowers, ovary length and angles between floral structures, not previously used in the taxonomy of this complex, are important characters for the recognition of taxa and can be further explored by future taxonomic studies of both the group and the genus.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Instituto Estadual de Florestas (IEF Minas Gerais), Instituto Florestal and Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade (ICMBio) for collecting licenses and logistical support; and the curators and staff of the herbaria for access to their collections. We also thank all those who helped with the field collections (Alexandre Medeiros, Carla Royer, Cecília Fiorini, Daniela Simão, Emerson Pansarin, Fernando Moro, George Fagundez, Geraldo Barfknecht, Ingo Bauer, Jacques Klein, Jader Caetano, Jomar Jardim, Leonardo Guimarães, Liliana Essi, Mônica Bolson, Silvia Estevez, Tadeu Motta, Thiago Meneguzzo and employess of the conservation units); Alexandre Salino, Cássio van den Berg, Luiz Eduardo Vieira del Bem, Rafael Felipe de Almeida for their suggestions on a preliminary version of the manuscript; two anonymous reviewers and Plant Systematics and Evolution editors Mike Thiv and Karol Marhold for improvements in the manuscript. This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, Brazil (CAPES, Finance Code 001) and Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais (FAPEMIG, CRA - APQ-03350-16). GCL thanks FAPEMIG (process 5308/15) for the doctoral scholarship. JANB (process 310690/2016-1) and ELB (process 311918/2014-0) are grateful for the research productivity grant received from Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Botânica, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Av. Antônio Carlos 6627, Pampulha, Caixa Postal 486, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, 31270-910, Brazil

    Gabriela Cruz-Lustre, João A. N. Batista & Eduardo L. Borba

  2. Dirección de Biodiversidad, Ministerio de Ecología y Recursos Naturales Renovables, Calle San Lorenzo 1538, Código Postal 3300, Posadas, Misiones, Argentina

    José A. Radins

  3. Departamento de Botánica, Museo Nacional de Historia Natural, Montevideo, Uruguay

    Andrés González

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  1. Gabriela Cruz-Lustre
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  2. João A. N. Batista
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Correspondence to Gabriela Cruz-Lustre.

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Online Resource 1. Populations of the morphotypes of the Habenaria parviflora complex used in this work.

Online Resource 2. Representation of the values of the first three canonical axes of the CVA of the 46 expanded populations of the Habenaria parviflora complex (Orchidaceae), belonging to 65 populations, using 16 morphological characters.

Online Resource 3. Dendrogram presenting the phenetic relationships of the separate analyses of Groups I and II with populations of the CG morphotype, constructed using a generalized Mahalanobis distance matrix of population centroids and the Neighbor-joining clustering algorithm.

Online Resource 4. Measurements of the 18 morphological characters used in the morphometric analysis of the 12 morphotypes of the Habenaria parviflora complex.

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Cruz-Lustre, G., Batista, J.A.N., Radins, J.A. et al. Morphometric analysis of the Habenaria parviflora complex (Orchidaceae). Plant Syst Evol 306, 37 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00606-020-01634-2

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