A new species of Taraxacum Wigg. (Asteraceae) from south-west England and Ireland

摘要

A new species of Dandelion, Taraxacum ronae, is described from England and Ireland. It has been known since 1973, but has been confused with other species in the Section Naevosa that also have strongly marked leaves. Many of the early gatherings of dandelions from Northern Ireland and Cornwall -members of the section Naevosa - were difficult to place within the framework of the pioneer account of Taraxacum in the British Isles (Richards 1972). Some of these were originally determined as T. maculigerum H. Lindb., later on as the newly-described T. maculosum A. J. Richards (Richards 1981), and finally as T. drucei Dahlst. The cause of this confusion was the unsuspected presence of a hitherto unnamed taxon, differing significantly from all these species. As material of this dandelion has been seen from four English and six Irish vice-counties, in a total of thirty-one 10 km squares (Fig. 2), it is now proposed to describe it as a new species.