expowo: An R package for mining global plant diversity and distribution data.

Premise: Data on plant distribution and diversity from natural history collections and taxonomic databases are increasingly becoming available online as exemplified by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew's Plants of the World Online (POWO) database. This growing accumulation of biodiversity information requires an advance in bioinformatic tools for accessing and processing the massive data for use in downstream science. We present herein expowo, an open-source package that facilitates extracting and using botanical data from POWO.

Twenty years of big plant genera.

In 2004, David Frodin published a landmark review of the history and concepts of big plant genera. Two decades of taxonomic activity have taken place since, coinciding with a revolution in phylogenetics and taxonomic bioinformatics. Here we use data from the World Flora Online (WFO) to provide an updated list of big (more than 500 species) and megadiverse (more than 1000 species) flowering plant genera and highlight changes since 2004.

Underground trees inhabit varied environmental extremes across the Afrotropics.

Background And Aims: Geoxyles, a distinctive feature of Afrotropical savannas and grasslands, survive recurrent disturbances by resprouting subshrub branches from large below-ground woody structures. Underground trees are a type of geoxyle that independently evolved within woody genera of at least 40 plant families in Africa. The environmental limits and determinants of underground tree biogeography are poorly understood, with the relative influence of frost and fire debated in particular.

A taxonomic revision of , including three new species and its phylogenetic realignment with Ehretiaceae (Boraginales).

is an enigmatic genus of lianescent shrubs endemic to Brazil and found within the Caatinga and Mata Atlântica phytogeographic regions. When first published, was included in the Convolvulaceae and there has been considerable recent disagreement about its true family placement on the Angiosperm tree of life. Based on further assessment of morphology and a new comprehensively-sampled combined phylogenetic analysis of nuclear and plastid genes from recently published DNA sequence data, we settle the position of the genus within the Ehretiaceae as sister to the Australian genus Gaudich.

Identifying hotspots for ecosystem restoration across heterogeneous tropical savannah-dominated regions.

There is high potential for ecosystem restoration across tropical savannah-dominated regions, but the benefits that could be gained from this restoration are rarely assessed. This study focuses on the Brazilian Cerrado, a highly species-rich savannah-dominated region, as an exemplar to review potential restoration benefits using three metrics: net biomass gains, plant species richness and ability to connect restored and native vegetation. Localized estimates of the most appropriate restoration vegetation type (grassland, savannah, woodland/forest) for pasturelands are produced.

The Origins of Tropical Rainforest Hyperdiversity.

Traditional models for tropical species richness contrast rainforests as "museums" of old species or "cradles" of recent speciation. High plant species diversity in rainforests may be more likely to reflect high episodic evolutionary turnover of species--a scenario implicating high rates of both speciation and extinction through geological time.