2017 ASHS Annual Conference

The objectives of this research is to identify morphological characters that can distinguish Plumeria spp. The question guiding this objective is: What morphological characters (floral, foliar, etc.) can be used to assess genetic relationships and thus identify Plumeria spp. The underlying hypothesis is that single character will be sufficient to distinguish species; rather, it will require a combination of characters. To test this hypothesis, a total of 75 taxa—verified and putative Plumeria sp. collected from Kauai, Oahu, and Florida—were scored on the presence or absence of 60 morphological characters. Maximum parsimony was conducted in Mesquite version 3.2 and principal components analysis was carried out in R version 3.4.0. The most parsimonious tree was 115 steps, with a consistency index of 0.7, retention index of 0.8, and bootstrap supports of 87% and higher. Principal components analysis indicated that taxa form 7 distinct clusters with 2 clusters of taxa overlapping the ranges of 3 distinct taxa. To this end, this suggests that there are 7 distinct species of Plumeria, and potentially hybrid varieties in existence today.