SYSTEMATICS AND BIOGEOGRAPHY OF THE AUSTRALIAN “GREEN ASH” EUCALYPTS (MONOCALYPTUS)

Abstract

Abstract— A cladistic analysis of the “green ash” eucalypts, informal subgenus “Monocalyptus”, is presented‐ As a first step, ordination methods of principal coordinates analysis and multidimensional scaling delineated some terminal taxa. The cladistic analysis, applying parsimony methods to the unweighted data set, yielded 25 equally parsimonious trees, each with a consistency index of 0.57. Farris' successive approximations approach to character weighting produced one tree with a consistency index of 0.74. An informal classification of the group, superseries Eucalyptus, is based on that cladogram. The biogeographic history of superseries Eucalyptus is interpreted from the cladogram as havi..