POACEAE, Barnhart, 1895

Banfi, Enrico, Galasso, Gabriele & Bartolucci, Fabrizio, 2018, Nomenclatural novelties for the Euro + Med flora, Natural History Sciences 5 (1), pp. 53-57 : 54

POACEAE

The submersion of the genera Chaetopogon Janch. and Ammophila Host respectively into Agrostis L. and Calamagrostis Adans. is made necessary according to the phylogenetic classification by Soreng et al. (2015, 2017). Regarding Piptatherum sect. Virescentia Roshev. ex Freitag (P. paradoxum and P. virescens), Romaschenko et al. (2012) studied evolution and systematics of Stipeae based on analysis of multiple chloroplast loci, ITS, and lemma micromorphology. They confirm that no doubt the two species in question lie among other old world taxa in the same clade as Achnatherum bromoides (L.) P.Beauv. and A. calamagrostis (L.) P.Beauv. (Romaschenko et al., 2010), where A. calamagrostis represents the lectotype of its genus. In particular, P. paradoxum and P. virescens result to be sister of A. bromoides (85 bootstrap from the analysis of plastid data). Authors conclude by saying that «The sister relationship of A. bromoides and Piptatherum sect. Virescentia is more plausible since the taxa share dark and coriaceous lemmas with a blunt callus, persistent awns, and similar habitats.». Based on these data we propose to transfer P. paradoxum and P. virescens to the genus Achnatherum, as already suggested by Kellogg (2015: 217). Finally, Trisetaria argentea “(Vill.)” Banfi & Soldano (1996) is an invalid name as uncorrectly established referring to a non-existent Villars’ basionym, therefore we propose again the same combination on the correct reference.