Typification of Aster Alpinus Var. Glabratus (Asteraceae)

Abstract

The name Aster alpinus var. glabratus Herbich was first published by Herbich (1834: 574) and linked with the description in Additamentum ad floram Galiciae (Herbich 1831: 44). The name was based on specimens he collected in the Pieniny Mountains, Western Carpathians, Poland. Aster alpinus var. glabratus is distinguished by its glabrous leaves which are ciliate at the margins, and involucral bracts (in the protologue inappropriately named ‘squamae calycinae’), as opposed to the nominal taxon with hairy (at least adaxially) laminae. Aster alpinus var. glabratus is widely distributed in the Western Carpathians (Poland, Slovakia) and Eastern Carpathians (Romania, Ukraine). Franz Herbich (1791–1865) visited the Pieniny Mountains in 1829, 1830 and 1832 (Herbich 1834: 564, 572). All the taxa from the Pieniny Mountains enumerated in his Additamentum were collected in 1829 (Herbich 1831: 6). Continuing a revision of Herbich’s collection, we found in the herbarium of the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv (LW) eight specimens collected by him in the Pieniny Mountains. Only two of them (LW 214582, LW 214579) come from 1829. Specimen LW 214582 is labelled A. alpinus without any intraspecific attributes. Specimen LW 214579 contains two labels with different names: A. alpinus var. glabriuscul[us] and A. alpinus var. pienninus, which, however, were never published. Remarks on the second of them conform to the diagnosis of A. alpinus var. glabratus stated in the protologue. Here we designate this specimen as the lectotype of the name A. alpinus var. glabratus (Fig. 1). On the herbarium sheet of LW 214577 the collecting date was given as ‘1829–1830–1832’; that is, the label includes all the years during which Herbich visited the Pieniny Mountains (Herbich 1834). The morphological characters of all the mentioned specimens suit the description of A. alpinus var. glabratus. The present paper is the latest in a series on the typification of the vascular plant taxa described from Poland (Cieślak & Paul 2011; Szeląg 2013; Szeląg & Kobiv 2014, 2016).