User:Daniel Mietchen/Sandbox/Brunfelsia uniflora

One of the earliest species named was 'Brunfelsia uniflora' (Pohl) D. Don, a relatively common and frequently collected species described from the vicinity of Rio de Janeiro (as Franciscea uniflora; Pohl, 1826). When revising the abundant and heterogeneous material, Plowman (1979, 1998) chose to retain a broad concept of this species although he noted that the species had a disjunct range, occurring in rain forests of southeastern Brazil, the relatively dry coast of Venezuela, and high altitude cloud forests of the Bolivian and Argentinian Andes, and that there seemed to be morphological differences that coincided with geography (Plowman, 1979, 1998). However, there was insufficient fertile material for Plowman to find a satisfactory solution before his untimely death in 1989, when material from Bolivia and northwestern Argentina was just beginning to flood into herbaria. Collections of the Andean Brunfelsia described here from F, MO, and NY over 10-year intervals between 1970 and 2010 indicate this explosive increase: 1920s – 1 collection, 1970s – 4, 1980s – 9, 1990s – 15, and 2000s – 14 collections. Because of his uncertainty as to the Andean populations, Plowman annotated Steinbach 8345 (GH) as B. uniflora in 1974, Beck 7439 (NY) as “Brunfelsia sp. aff. B. uniflora” in 1982, and Vervoorst-Legname 4564 (NY) as “Brunfelsia sp. nov. aff B. uniflora” in 1985.