English: Spleenworts.
German: Streifenfarngewächse; Tüpfelfarnartige.
Clades:
Aspleniales; Aspleniineae;
Polypodianae;
Pteridophyta;
Plants.
Genera: 2: Asplenium, over 700 species; Hymenasplenium, ± 35 species.
Region: worldwide.
Habitat: temperate and tropical.
Plant theoryAspleniaceae is treated as a family in the order
Aspleniales and Subclass
Aspleniidae. It is placed in subphase 7.
TaxonomyAspleniaceae have been subject to considerable changes. The narrow circumscription of
Aspleniaceae contains only two genera. A very broad
Aspleniaceae includes ten other families, which can be named
Aspleniales.
Aspleniaceae was first described by Edward Newman in 1840, with three genera: Athyrium, Asplenium and Scolopendrium. Athyrium is now placed in a different family,
Athyriaceae, not considered very strongly related to the
Aspleniaceae, and Scolopendrium is regarded as synonym of Asplenium. Asplenium has previously been split into a dozen or so genera. Modern consensus of molecular phylogenetic studies is that all are nested within Asplenium. Christenhusz and Chase had proposed a much broader circumscription of
Aspleniaceae, in which it consisted of all the separate families that PPG I places in the suborder Aspleniineae (eight at the time), with the families reduced to subfamilies. Thus the
Aspleniaceae of PPG I became the subfamily Asplenioideae.
BotanyIdentification: elongated; unpaired sori.
Ferns.
Root: rhizomes, creeping or somewhat erect, usually unbranched; with clathrate scales, a lattice-like structure; with dictyostelic, radial or dorsiventral steles, two vascular bundles C-shaped to elliptic or X-shaped.
Leaves: undivided or divided, with up to four-fold pinnation; petioles have two vascular bundles, uniting to form an X-shape in cross-section towards the tip of the leaf; stalks of the sporangia are one cell wide in the middle.
Sori: elongated, linear; unpaired per vein, rarely in pairs; never curving over the vein; indusium flap-like, along one edge of a sorus.
Sporangia: stalks that are uniseriate in the middle.
Clades1 Asplenium erosum clade
2 Phyllitis clade
3 Neottopteris clade
4 Tarachia clade
5 Schaffneria clade
6
Asplenium trichomanes clade
7 Asplenium dareoides clade
8 Asplenium clade
9 Asplenium aegeum clade
10 Asplenium bullatum clade
11 Pleurosorus clade
LiteratureXu, Ke-Wang & others; A global plastid phylogeny of the fern genus Asplenium (
Aspleniaceae); Wiley blackweel, Cladistics; 2019.