Format: ORAL

Jos I. Mrquez-Corro1, Pedro Jimnez-Mejas2, Millard Uy3, David A. Simpson1 Isabel Larridon1

1 Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond, United Kingdom 2 Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain 3 Independent researcher, Cebu, Philippines

Studies on global biodiversity are detecting common gaps in the taxonomic knowledge of tropical areas. While some of these areas are not necessarily considered hotspots, these are still incredibly diverse, and the knowledge gap extends widely to non-woody plants as they tend to be out of focus in regions dominated by tropical forests, which may underestimate diversity levels. For Cyperaceae, the third most biodiverse monocot family and among the top ten in angiosperms, Southeast Asia is the perfect example of such a situation. Despite having diversified worldwide into more than 5000 species with a particular preference for temperate areas in the largest genus Carex (40% of the family), there are over 600 taxa native to Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, the lack of historical collections, digitization of herbaria, and lack of support in Cyperaceae expertise for local research groups have turned the region into a darkspot for sedges. To protect current sedge diversity, understand their natural history, and predict their future, we must put forward a set of international collaborations with in-country researchers to improve the available information for this economically and ecologically important family. We hope to start a much-needed new era of collaborations in Southeast Asian sedge-focused projects, aiming to generate taxonomic, geographical, morphological, molecular, genomic, biochemical, and ecological data, accompanied by photographic records of taxa and sets of data that will be publicly available. Objectives such as training resident taxonomists, digitization of local herbaria, or providing international long-term financial support are some of the crucial steps towards the establishment of sedge research lines in Southeast Asia.