The trouble with Ipomoea

I think we may have mentioned in a recent Brainfood a “foundation monograph” of the genus Ipomoea in Bolivia,1 without actually explaining what that is. Well, I’ll let one of the authors do that:

‘We wondered if we might be able to combine some of the speed of a Flora approach with some of the rigour of a Monograph,’ explains Dr Scotland. ‘And we’ve ended up with what we call “foundation monographs”.’ The new approach combines the time-limited approach and short descriptions of the Flora approach with the genetic analyses and fieldwork of Monographs, enabling species to be uncovered quickly, but accurately. Crucially, it borrows content like drawings and genetic analyses, where they exist, from existing studies, in order to avoid duplicating work.

Such work — whether floras or monographs — is largely based on existing herbarium specimens, of course, and a complementary study led by Zoë Goodwin, on which Dr Scotland is also a co-author, has just come out which sets out some of the problems associated with that.

…the team…scoured the records of Ipomoea — a large and diverse genus which includes the sweet potato — on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility database. Examining the names found on 49,500 specimens from the Americas, they found that 40% of these were outdated synonyms rather than the current name, and 16% of the names were unrecognisable or invalid. In addition, 11% of the specimens weren’t identified, being given only the name of the genus.2

The work of the crop wild relatives mapper is never done.

  1. It’s the group of plants that includes the cultivated sweet potato, which makes at least one of the 102 species described here a close crop wild relatives. []
  2. Here’s an interesting comment on this. []

One Reply to “The trouble with Ipomoea”

  1. The main thing the study shows me (as a plant taxonomist) is the value of skilled collecting. Of 102 species of of Ipomoea in Bolivia there were 18 new species – all from J.R.I. Wood’s work (no relation but we both collected the new species Erucastrum woodiorum for the same locality in Yemen at different times).
    The problem with a `foundation monograph’ for one genus
    from one country is that a lot of the supposedly endemic species may be previously described under other names from other countries – you really have to look at the entire range of a genus (as J.R.I. Wood must have done but which a single-country study will fail to do).
    Thirty years ago, by chance, I was locked in the corner of a crowded tube train heading for Kew one evening with the Director of Kew and the Keeper of the Herbarium. I ear-bashed them for 30 minutes on the need for good monographs of crop relatives. No success: herbarium taxonomist hated crops and their relatives – in the days before genomics it was a nightmare.
    The USA was different – for example, Goodspeed on Nicotiana and Rogers on Manihot and Harlan and de Wet and lots more. Percival’s monograph of wheat was history – 1921.

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