Transition of survival strategies under global climate shifts in the grape family.

Faced with environmental changes, plants may either move to track their ancestral niches or evolve to adapt to new niches. Vitaceae, the grape family, has evolved diverse adaptive traits facilitating a global expansion in wide-ranging habitats, making it ideal for investigating transition between move and evolve strategies and exploring the underlying mechanisms. Here we inferred the patterns of biogeographic diversification and trait evolution in Vitaceae based on a robust phylogeny with dense sampling including 495 species (~52% of Vitaceae species).

Spatial heterogeneity of neo- and paleo-endemism for plants in Madagascar.

Madagascar is a biogeographically unique island with a remarkably high level of endemism. However, endemic taxa in Madagascar are massively threatened due to unprecedented pressures from anthropogenic habitat modification and climate change. A comprehensive phylogeny-based biodiversity evaluation of the island remains lacking.

The Sino-Himalayan flora evolved from lowland biomes dominated by tropical floristic elements.

Background: The Sino-Himalayan flora harbors highly diverse high-elevation biotas, but our understanding of its evolutionary history in temporal and spatial dimensions is limited. In this study, we integrated a dated phylogenetic tree with comprehensive species distribution data to investigate changes over time and space in floristic elements, including the tropical, Tethys, northern temperate, and East Asian floristic elements, across the entire Sino-Himalaya and its three floristic regions: the Yunnan Plateau, Hengduan Mountains, and East Himalaya regions.

Results: Our results revealed that the Sino-Himalayan flora developed from lowland biomes and was predominantly characterized by tropical floristic elements before the collision between the Indian subcontinent and Eurasia during the Early Cenozoic.

Paleoaltingia gen. nov., a new genus of Altingiaceae from the Late Cretaceous of New Jersey.

Premise: Altingiaceae is a small family with a bimodal Northern Hemisphere distribution in eastern North America and eastern Asia, and a rich Cenozoic fossil record. The charcoalified fossil infructescence Paleoaltingia gen. nov.

Diversification in Qinghai-Tibet Plateau: Orchidinae (Orchidaceae) clades exhibiting pre-adaptations play critical role.

We explore the origins of the extraordinary plant diversity in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) using Orchidinae (Orchidaceae) as a model. Our results indicate that six major clades in Orchidinae exhibited substantial variation in the temporal and spatial sequence of diversification. Our time-calibrated phylogenetic model suggests that the species-richness of Orchidinae arose through a combination of in situ diversification, colonisation, and local recruitment.

Molecular systematics of Dendrobium (Orchidaceae, Dendrobieae) from mainland Asia based on plastid and nuclear sequences.

Dendrobium is one of the three largest genera and presents some of the most intricate taxonomic problems in the family Orchidaceae. Based on five DNA markers and a broad sampling of Dendrobium and its relatives from mainland Asia (109 species), our results indicate that mainland Asia Dendrobium is divided into eight clades (with two unplaced species) that form polytomies along the spine of the cladogram. Both Dendrobium and Epigeneium are well supported as monophyletic, whereas sect.

Monophyly or paraphyly--the taxonomy of Holcoglossum (Aeridinae: Orchidaceae).

Recently, there have been a lot of intense debates about the acceptance/rejection of paraphyletic groups in biological classification. On the one hand, evolutionary classification states that similarity and common descent are two criteria for biological classification and paraphyletic groups are natural units of biological classification. On the other hand, cladistic classification considers that common descent is the only criterion in biological classification and monophyly should be strictly adhered to.