Chinese and Vietnamese botanists have jointly discovered six new species of Aspidistra plants from southern China and northern Vietnam, the Guangxi Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced.
The newly discovered species comprise four from South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Southwest China's Guizhou province – Aspidistra dentata, A. dissecta, A. dongxingensis and A. anlongensis, as well as two from Ba Be National Park in northern Vietnam – A. longibracteata and A. backanensis.
The new findings have been published in the international botanical taxonomy journal Phytotaxa.
The Vietnam – China border region is known as a centre of Aspidistra diversity and evolution.
Since 2019, researchers from the Guangxi Plant Diversity Research and Innovation Team have been collaborating with Vietnamese botanists from the Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources under the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology to conduct biodiversity surveys in the karst environments of the region. Over the years, they have collected various Aspidistra species and after extensive analyses and comparison, six new species were identified./.
