The Malay Cardamom Meistera aculeata (Roxb.) Škorničk . & M.F. Newman (Zingiberaceae: Alpinioideae) from the Palghat gap: a new record to Kerala, India

Meistera aculeata (Roxb.) Škorničk. & M.F.Newman (Zingiberaceae, subfamily - Alpinioideae) a lesser known species, has been located from the Palakkad (Palghat) Gap region in the Walayar Hill ranges of the southern Western Ghats and reported here as an addition to the flora of Kerala.  A detailed taxonomic description along with photographs are provided.


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Zingiberaceae, the ginger family, comprises 53 genera and more than 1,375 species widely distributed throughout tropical Africa, Asia, and America (Kress et al. 2002;Kong et al. 2010). Amomum Roxb s.l. is the second largest genus in the family Zingiberaceae with about 150-180 species (Xia et al. 2004). The distribution of the genus in India is concentrated in northeastern India, peninsular India, and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands with 22 species (Thomas & Sabu 2012). Amomum is reported to have 48 species in the Flora of British India (Hooker 1894), while five species were reported by Fischer (1928) in the Flora of Presidency of Madras. Recent taxonomic studies have resulted in the discovery of 12 taxa under the genus Amomum (Thomas et al. 2010(Thomas et al. , 2012a(Thomas et al. ,b, 2014(Thomas et al. , 2015(Thomas et al. , 2016Thomas & Sabu 2012;Hareesh & Sabu 2018).
Presently Amomum is circumscribed to a monophyletic genus based on multi-marker phylogenetic framework using matK and nrITS as markers. The targeted sampling combined with the molecular data, phylogenetic analysis and morphological characters allowed the re-circumscription of 10 clades of the genus Amomum as separate genera (De Boer et al. 2018). Accordingly, certain species in the genus Amomum are either resurrected or transferred to the genus Meistera Giseke.
Meistera is characterized by semi-lunar anther crest, echinate fruit and solitary flower in each fertile bract (Thomas & Sabu 2018). The genus comprises 42 species and three varieties, and is distributed from Sri Lanka and India, throughout the Indo-Chinese region to Sundaland (De Boer et al. 2018).
Ecology: This plant grows at an elevation of 500-600m in humus-covered semi-evergreen forest floor. Small populations at an average of 20-30 mature plants were observed within a distance of 100m. The taxon was found growing in some restricted localities of Walayar forest range along with Ancistrocladus heyneanus Wall. ex J. Graham, Atalantia monophylla D.C., Dioscorea oppositifolia L., Cyclea peltata (Lam.) Hook.f. & Thomson and Anamirta cocculus (L.) Wight & Arn.

Discussion
In the Palghat Gap region, exhaustive surveys covering the nearby forest ranges could not locate this species. Recently, this species was reported from Pushpagiri Wildlife sanctuary, Kodagu, Karnataka (Patil & Lakshminarasimhan 2018) and earlier from Andaman & Nicobar Islands (Balakrishnan & Nair 1979). Further, the threat status of the taxon is designated as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List (Olander 2020). As the population is discrete and discontinuous, the most appropriate causes for these disjunctions need to be studied and exhaustive explorations are required to fix the threat status of this taxon.  www.threatenedtaxa.org

References
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