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A revision of <I>Beilschmiedia</I> (<I>Lauraceae</I>) of Peninsular Malaysia

2016; National Herbarium of the Netherlands; Volume: 61; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3767/000651916x693004

2212-1676

R.P.J. de Kok,

Plant Parasitism and Resistance

The genus Beilschmiedia Nees was first described by Nees von Esenbeck in Wallich (1831) and is named after Karl Traugott Beilschmied, a chemist and botanist (1793 -1848), who wrote mainly about plant geography.The genus is pantropical, with currently about 200 -300 species being recognised.The recognition of genera within the Lauraceae and the classification of the family have always been problematic.The general framework of characters which have been employed by most authors was first established by Nees von Esenbeck (1836).How ever, even within this framework, classifications can vary greatly, depending upon the weight given to any particular character.The placement of Beilschmiedia, together with Cryptocarya R.Br. and Endiandra R.Br. in one group was first proposed by Richter (1981) based on wood and bark anatomy.His findings were confirmed by later molecular studies (Rohwer et al. 2014), and Beilschmiedia is now placed in the Cryptocarya group as one of the early divergent clades within the family (Rohwer 2000, Rohwer et al. 2014).The genus has never been revised in full, but a number of important modern regional revisions exist, indicating a range in levels of local endemicity.In Madagascar, Van der Werff (2003) recognised nine species, all endemic; in Australia, 11 species occur, among which 10 (90 %) are endemic (Le Cusan & Hyland 2007); in China, Li et al. (2008a) recognised 39 species, of which 33 (c.85 %) are endemic; and in Borneo, Nishida (2006) recognised 26 species, with 16 (61 %) of them endemic.An unpublished MSc thesis (Tetsana 2005) recognised 16 species in Thailand, of which two were new to science, eight were newly recorded for the country, and only four (25 %) were considered endemic; most of the non-endemics that occur in Thailand have distributions that extend to China, India and Myanmar rather than to Peninsular Malaysia.The most recent checklist for Peninsular Malaysia, by Turner (1995), recognised 18 species, the same number as in this present treatment.Among these 18 species, only seven are endemic (c.38 %) though a further three (17 %) are restricted to Peninsular Thailand and Peninsular Malaysia together.The remaining species are more widespread and either also occur on the Sunda Plateau (Borneo, Java and Sumatra, extending to the Philippines in the case of B. lucidula), or, like most Thai species, they have distributions that extend into mainland Thailand, Indo-China, India or China.At present, no species from Peninsular Malaysia occurs east of the Wallace Line.