Reassessment of morphological species delimitations in the Cyperus margaritaceus-niveus complex using morphometrics

Background and aims – The Cyperus margaritaceus-niveus complex is a group of ten tropical species from sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar: C. karlschumanii, C. kibweanus, C. ledermannii, C. margaritaceus, C. niveus, C. nduru, C. obtusiflorus, C. somaliensis, C. sphaerocephalus, and C. tisserantii. They are characterised by a capitate head of white-yellow spikelets and modified culm bases and recent molecular analysis puts them in as a distinct clade. The group lacks a modern taxonomic revision, and the taxa described in the Flora treatments of the past 50 years differ considerably in their circumscription. In this study, morphometric analyses are used to test species limits to establish more stable morphological delimitations of the taxa.
Material and methods – An examination of 15 morphological characters on 489 herbarium specimens was carried out and the data was analysed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) with cross-validation, and Classificat..., Please see the README document and the accompanying published article: Xanthos, M., Mayo, S.J. & Larridon (2022) Reassessment of morphological species delimitations in the Cyperus margaritaceus-niveus complex using morphometrics. Plant Ecology and Evolution. 156 (1): 112-127., The programs and software required to open the data files are as follows:
R Studio 2022.07.02
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