Talk:Monotropoideae

Expansion of this article
I see this article was created in early November as a stub describing the basics of this subfamily, as a replacement for the earlier low-quality stub on Monotropaceae. As coincidence would have it, I recently completed a thoroughly researched, lengthy term paper on this group for a plant taxonomy class I was taking, and am using this as the basis for this article. (Don't worry - I'm not just cutting and pasting the paper wholesale, but making sure everything conforms to Wikipedia rules and style guidelines.)

The first part of this has been to expand the article in general across all topics so that there's basic coverage for most aspects of this family. I intend on following this up with more lengthy section-by-section expansion, and creation of a concise summary paragraph at the beginning as this article gets longer. My goal is to expand this to Good Article and eventually Feature Article status, using Cactus and Liliaceae as a template, as these seem to be the the highest-rated plant family articles.

One issue is the status of the Pyroleae - historically, it's been variously treated as part of the Monotropoideae, or as a separate subfamily, the Pyroloideae (notably, the extensive monography by Wallace (1975), which I draw on heavily, doesn't treat the pyroloid group as part of the Monotropoideae). This uncertain status has continued into the contemporary phylogenetic era, with some authors treating it part of a common clade with the other two subfamilies of Monotropoideae, and others not (albeit, most of these studies have suffered from low bootstrap support for relationships at this level). The most recent evidence, based on Liu, et al (2011) and unpublished data by Freudenstein and Broe cited by Mercx, Freudenstein, et al (2013) strongly suggest that the pyroloids aren't part of a common monophyletic group with the monotropes, exclusive of other members of the Ericaceae. This definitely is in line with the overall morphology, where the pyroloids have quite a few differences with the monotropes proper, and not just in the area of being photosynthetic and partially as opposed to fully mycoheterotrophic.

In the article this leads to all kinds of parenthetical remarks on the differences of the Pyroleae from the general pattern of the Monotropoideae. I would probably prefer to move the article on the Pyroleae to Pyroloideae and treat that group there. (Actually, checking on this, it looks like User:Peter coxhead has just done this. - Thanks!) While Wikipedia shouldn't take a point of view on unsettled science, I think this is the direction the classification of this group is going in.

The other area I'm struggling with is Wikipedia's labor-intensive citation template, which is something that makes the already laborious process of citing each fact a dozen times more difficult, as one now needs to take an existing bibliographic entry and fit it into template form. I've been simply entering standard bibliographic entries, altered to WP's bibliographic style rather than use the template. I hope that's OK, because putting everything in template form will be a lot of work, unless there's some way of automating it. If this absolutely must be done, I'll take care of it after I've taken care of the writing, but would appreciate help in this area. Peter G Werner (talk) 06:20, 30 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Citations now formatted with templates. Sasata (talk) 19:01, 2 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Peter G Werner (talk) 21:23, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

Phylogeny and placement of Pyroleae
Just reviewed the phylogenies of Kron et al. 2002 and Braukmann & Stefanovic 2012. The placement of Pyroleae in Monotropoideae is indeed poorly supported. This is probably one of the questions that will only be resolved will full-genome phylogenetics. For the time being, I would argue to keep the Pyroleae in here, following the last formal classification by Kron et al. To make any future rearrangement easier, I would keep Pyroleae characteristics here to a minimum, in separate paragraphs, and rather expand the Pyroleae article, since the tribe seems to be well defined. I could make phylograms showing the two different phylogenies mentioned. Tylototriton (talk) 14:37, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

External links modified (February 2018)
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