Piptostigma revised, Brieya reinstated and 4 new species from Cameroon
The revision of Brieya and Piptostigma from Africa is published in Plant Ecology and Evolution.
Blogs
Filtered on Author (Thomas Couvreur), Taxonomy term (Annonaceae).
27 species in Oxandra
Oxandra is finally revised. The revision was published in Blumea this week and is open access.
The genus now counts 27 species, plus a possible new one that remains undescribed because it still lacks good material.
A new lemon scented species of Uvariopsis from Gabon
In June 2016 I went to the Monts de Cristal National Park in Gabon (as part of the AFRODYN project), basically to the same area where Hervé Sauquet and myself discovered Sirdavidia solannona back in 2012. I was walking aorund trying to find more individuals and populations of Sirdavidia and checking to see if it was flowering (which it was not...).
New Annonaceae genus discovered in Gabon
A new genus of Annonaceae was discovered last year by Thomas Couvreur and Hervé Sauquet in the Parque National des Monts de Cristal, Gabon. It was named Sirdavidia in honor of Sir David Attenborough. It was published in the open access journal PhytoKeys: http://phytokeys.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=4665
Follow the link to know more!
Bye Bye Fitzalania
In the latest issue of Systematic Botany (39(2):396-404. 2014), Dr. Bine and colleagues have taken care of yet another bunch of wrongly named Polyalthia species (four of them) and the genus Fitzalania. Fitzalania comprises two species endemic to Australia. Molecular data has long shown that this later genus was nested within the lovely Meiogyne genus (Mols et al. 2004; Xue et al. 2011, Thomas et al. 2012) .
Monodora species are off the Critically Endangered IUCN list
In 2006 I described a new species of Monodora: M. hastipetala. This species was only known from a single locality: The Matumbi Hills in Tanzania. It is a beautiful and delicate species. Though it was locally abundant in the Hills, it was still assessed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN Species Survival Commission Eastern Africa Plant Red List Authority chaired by Quentin Luke.
Monodora hastipetala Couvreur:
Interactive Key to Annonaceae genera
Scratchpads are evoluving at an incredible rate. We are already at the version 2.0. Recently, they have added a great new functionality: Lucid Interactive keys. As I have had an interactive key of Annonaceae done for some time, with the help of David Johnson and based on the Couvreur et al 2012 publication, I jumped on the occasion to published it via AfroAnnons!
Two new genera in Annonaceae!
This week we saw two new genera described or resurected, both from South East Asia. These genera have been segregated from the large and polypheletic genus Polyalthia (Chatrou et al 2012). So the taxonomy of the complicated genus is advancing which is great for Annonaceae systematics.
Check out the bibliography page for the references. The Phytotaxa article about Hubera (Chaowasku et al 2012) is open access.
Annonaceae from Cameroon
In February 2012 I went on a field trip to Cameroon. The goal of this trip was to collect species of rattan palms for my master degree student. However, along the way I also made some nice collections of Annonaceae which I explain here.
New species from Tanzania (again!)
All the new species of Annonaceae I have described to date come from Tanzania. I guess this isn’t a coincidence. Tanzania has a huge amount of diversity and a lot of it is still waiting to be described.
