XVI International Botanical Congess

Recently, large molecular data sets that include a broad array of seed plants have become available. Our ability to analyze these data sets has improved dramatically with methods such as the jackknife (Farris) and tree search algorithms developed by Goloboff that have been available for several years in the program NONA, and have been promised for the next version of PAUP*. Additionally, a new method developed by Nixon, the parsimony ratchet, improves performance by at least another order of magnitude. With these methods we have been able to quickly analyze data sets ranging in size from 150 to 850 taxa with a variety of molecular data from published sources, combined with new morphological matrices that correspond to the molecular sampling and additionally include fossil taxa. The most recent of these analyses will be presented.