Plantas vasculares de Cuba: inventario preliminar. Vascular plants of Cuba: a preliminary checklist (original) (raw)

Parte general ix forthcoming vol. 23 of the Flora. Moreover we have incorporated data that appear in various works published during the last year, or published earlier but previously overlooked. Whenever possible we have filled in the province-by-province distributional data, based on published information. The source of distributional data and of names that are new or changed with respect to the first edition has been cited in apposite Notes, at the end. The most conspicuous new item of the current edition is the addition, at the end, of a checklist of Cuban Pteridophytes. This novel Checklist is based principally on Sánchez's (2017) recently published list of ferns and "lycophytes" of Cuba. In the classification and nomenclature here adopted, we chose however to follow a different model: the one proposed in the modern and well documented "linear sequence of extant families and genera of lycophytes and ferns" of Christenhusz & al. (2011). That classification has been proposed as an international standard for use in, e. g., books, checklists, Floras, herbaria, living collections, and spore banks: the same use that our Checklist, by implication, is destined to serve. The said classification, based on a comprehensive study of modern systematic literature and on international collaboration, promises to be more stable and thus better suited for our purposes than the notoriously ephemeral and changeable proposals from groups such as APG or PPG (Schuettpelz & al. 2016), followed by Sánchez (2017). We deviate from the precepts of Christenhusz & al. (2011) in a single instance: we do not accept the three satellite genera of Thelypteris of these authors, given that, as they admit, generic relationships in Thelypteridaceae are not well understood at present; moreover, the nomenclature they adopt is faulty (they include the earlier Meniscium Schreb., as a synonym, in Cyclosorus Link). We therefore retain Thelypteris in the traditional, wide sense, the same that was used also in the Flora de la República de Cuba (Sánchez & al. in Greuter & Rankin Rodríguez 2006). At family level, only minimal differences exist between our treatment and that of Sánchez (2017), and they concern only the placement of two species: we include Didymochlaenaceae in Hypodematiaceae and Hemidictyaceae in Diplaziopsidaceae. The current edition of the Checklist was not generated directly by data download from the database version, as would have been desirable, but results from editing of the previous text version. This means that, when this edition is published online, the database version, which can be consulted interactively, is not fully congruent with it but is less complete and not fully updated. We expect that, thanks to the aid of Prof. Walter Berendsohn and his data specialists team at the Berlin Botanical Museum, this regrettable incongruence will not last for long. The continued improvement and upgrading of the editorial platform EDIT that serves the database "The Spermatophyta of Cuba" (http://portal.cybertaxonomy.org/flora-cuba/) will henceforth permit direct, continued updating of the database itself, so that the subsequent consolidated editions of the Checklist can be generated directly through download from the database.