Panarctic Flora

343223 Puccinellia bruggemannii T.J. Sørensen

2n= 28 (4x). - Canada. - Bowden (1961); Hedberg (1967).

Geography: North American (N): CAN GRL.

Notes: Ovczinnikova (1989) sketched a subgeneric system for Puccinellia and described the new section Pumilae to include the group of species below. However, she also included some quite aberrant species in the section, e.g., P. svalbardensis which must belong elsewhere.

We are confused by the different divisions and conclusions in this group and may not have got the arguments right. Sørensen in Hultén (1950) accepted the major parts of the group as three subspecies of P. langeana: subsp. typica (subsp. langeana) reported from the Chukchi Peninsula, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland (type from western Greenland); subsp. asiatica reported from Vaigach in northeastern European Russia, the Chukchi Peninsula (type), and Alaskan St. Lawrence Island; and subsp. alaskana as restricted to the Bering Sea islands (type from the Alaskan Pribilof Islands: St. Paul Island). All these plants are diploids.

Sørensen (1953) designated a neotype for P. tenella (also from Vaigach) that seems to have made this name referring to a northern Eurasian plant different from P. langeana subsp. asiatica. Tzvelev (1964c) rejected Sørensen's neotype of P. tenella and proposed a lectotype from Vaigach making this name synonymous with P. langeana subsp. asiatica. This change has not been uniformly accepted, see Soreng et al. (2003: 600), but we assume than only one taxon of the group is present on Vaigach. The name Glyceria tenella Lange 1882 has priority before Glyceria langeana Berlin 1884.

Soreng et al. (2003) synonymized the assumedly diploid P. langeana subsp. alaskana with the western North American hexaploid and octoploid P. pumila but excluded P. tenella. Davis and Consaul (2007) accepted P. pumila as circumscribed by Soreng et al. (i.e., including P. alaskana) and P. tenella to include P. langeana as its American representative (i.e., they implied an Eurasian subsp. tenella). They commented, however, that very recent results supported the diploid P. alaskana as a species apart from the polyploid P. pumila. We follow Davis & Consaul (2007) with the addition of P. alaskana.