Abstract
A working checklist of accepted taxa worldwide is vital in achieving the goal of developing an online flora of all known plants by 2020 as part of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation. We here present the first-ever worldwide checklist for liverworts (Marchantiophyta) and hornworts (Anthocerotophyta) that includes 7486 species in 398 genera representing 92 families from the two phyla. The checklist has far reaching implications and applications, including providing a valuable tool for taxonomists and systematists, analyzing phytogeographic and diversity patterns, aiding in the assessment of floristic and taxonomic knowledge, and identifying geographical gaps in our understanding of the global liverwort and hornwort flora. The checklist is derived from a working data set centralizing nomenclature, taxonomy and geography on a global scale. Prior to this effort a lack of centralization has been a major impediment for the study and analysis of species richness, conservation and systematic research at both regional and global scales. The success of this checklist, initiated in 2008, has been underpinned by its community approach involving taxonomic specialists working towards a consensus on taxonomy, nomenclature and distribution.
Highlights
The natural world is changing fast (Balmford et al 2005)
The series of notes on taxonomy and nomenclature of liverworts and hornworts provided updated nomenclature, corrected invalid and illegitimate names and described new taxa based on studies that did not draw nomenclatural conclusions
3,106 references in the bibliography that serve as a powerful bibliographic resource for liverwort and hornwort systematic and taxonomic research
Summary
The natural world is changing fast (Balmford et al 2005). The Global Strategy for. Paton noted that good progress had been made in bryophytes (mosses, liverworts and hornworts), ferns and gymnosperms with widely accessible working lists either complete or almost so for those groups For bryophytes alone, he tabulated 13,370 accepted species noting that the data was largely derived from Tropicos. The lack of a central source providing a synthesis of nomenclatural data and global distributional data was the impetus toward developing the current checklist of liverworts and hornworts (von Konrat et al 2008a, 2010d, Söderström et al 2012e). The coding convention we are adopting largely follows that described by von Konrat et al (2010d) using one to three stars, which has been applied to recent regional checklists produced by the Early Land Plants. Adopting a narrower species concept so that many of her subspecies are elevated to species does not change her view of what a good taxon is
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