Format: ORAL

Cassiano A. D. Welker1, Christian da Silva2, Pedro L. Viana3, Reyjane P. Oliveira4

1 Universidade Federal de Uberlândia, Uberlândia, Brazil 2 Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina, Laguna, Brazil 3 Instituto Nacional da Mata Atlântica, Santa Teresa, Brazil 4 Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana, Feira de Santana, Brazil

Brazil is a megadiverse country and houses a larger number of plant species than any other country in the world. The study of its flora has a long history, including many foreign naturalists collecting in Brazil throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and sending these plants to European herbaria. Until recently, the most comprehensive treatment of the Brazilian flora was the Flora Brasiliensis, edited by Carl Friedrich von Martius (1840-1906). Over the past 15 years, a huge number of taxonomists have joined efforts in the Flora of Brazil project, motivated to meet Target 1 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC). The Flora of Brazil project currently recognizes more than 52 thousand species of algae, fungi, and plants that occur in the country. Identification keys, morphological descriptions, illustrations, and data on their habitat and geographic distribution are available online for most taxa, including grasses. Poaceae is the fourth richest angiosperm family in Brazil, with around 230 genera and 1.560 species. These numbers correspond to almost a third of the genera and about 13% of the grass species in the world. Of these, 24 genera and about 520 species are endemic to Brazil. Representatives of all subfamilies, except Puelioideae, occur in Brazil, including Anomochlooideae, the first lineage that diverged within Poaceae. This subfamily predominates in Brazilian forests, as do Pharoideae and Bambusoideae, while Panicoideae (the richest subfamily in Brazil) dominates tropical and subtropical grasslands. On the other hand, Pooideae and Danthonioideae have a predominantly extratropical distribution in Brazil, decreasing in species richness and density from south to north. Phylogenetic studies including Brazilian grasses have increased greatly in the last decade, as well as the number of new taxonomists in this family, improving our knowledge about genera and species and resulting in several nomenclatural changes in taxa from Brazil.