Data from: Between spines and molecules: a total evidence phylogeny of the Brazilian endemic genus Encholirium (Pitcairnioideae, Bromeliaceae)

We performed a phylogenetic study of Encholirium (Bromeliaceae,
Pitcairnioideae) to test if this Brazilian endemic genus is monophyletic
when including additional species and morphological characters compared to
previous studies. Extensive fieldwork to increase the sampling of
Encholirium and evolutionary analyses were conducted. Species of
Fosterella, the sister group of the xeric clade of Pitcairnioideae, were
used as outgroups. We analyzed two chloroplast DNA sequence markers (matK
and ndhF) and 49 morphological characters with maximum parsimony analyses
(MP), Bayesian inference (BI), and maximum likelihood (ML) with different
sampling in the molecular analyses than the morphological. The
phylogenetic analyses of the datasets, both independently and combined,
did not recover Encholirium as monophyletic. We found few variable sites
in the sequences used. This result is evidence of low nucleotide
divergence and corroborates the hypothesis of the recent evolutionary
history of these plants. The morphological differences between Dyckia and
Encholirium, which are demonstrably associated with distinct pollination
syndromes, ant-plant interactions, and single-multiple reproductive
episodes, likely emerged in a short period of diversification in species
assigned to these two genera.