XVI International Botanical Congess

Flacourtiaceae are a large pantropical family, comprising 79 genera and approximately 880 species that occur mainly in primary or secondary forest. The family is placed at the base of the order Violales by Takhtajan (1980), Cronquist (1981), and Thorne (1981) and is widely recognized as being of major phylogenetic importance, Lemke, 1988. Casearia Jacq. is one of the most representative genus, grouping about 180 species, 75 of them are in the tropical and subtropical America where at the same time, we find greatest diversity in the genus. Sleumer, 1980. It=s important to point out that ACasearias ilicoides@ group endemics from Cuba and Hispaniola are included. Taking into account thirty characters that include aspects of general morphology, leaf anatomy, seeds integuments and some other palynological characters, through the NTSYS program a taximetric analysis has been made. As a result of this research, 20 Casearia taxa in the Greater Antilles has been delimitated. The author demonstrates that the results obtained by Sleumer, 1980 based on the macromorphological characters do not show the real fenetics relationship between the taxa.