XVI International Botanical Congess

Over the past decades a large body of evidence has been accumulated on comparative morphology, Karyology, phytochemistry and palynology of the genus Pelargonium by laboratories from England, Germany, South Africa and the US. This has resulted in the current classification of Pelargonium into 16 sections. Understanding of evolutionary relationships across the genus based on cladistic analyses of well-defined characters has been generally lacking however. In this presentation phylogenetic reconstructions will be discussed, based on simultaneous cladistic analyses of different types of data including that from nuclear rDNA ITS, chloroplast trnL-F and mitochondrial nad1 b/c sequences.