862217 Artemisia kruhsiana Besser
- Besser, Nouv. Mém. Soc. Imp. Naturalistes Moscou 3: 22 (1834). Holotype (LE)?: Russian Far East: the Magadan area, "prope Iziga Ischiga", leg. Kruhse.
- Artemisia lagocephala auct., non (Fisch. ex Besser) DC. (1838).
Geography: Asian (NE) - amphi-Beringian.
Notes: Elven and Murray: Ling (1996) applied the name Artemisia lagocephala (Fisch. ex Besser) DC., Prodr. 6: 122 (1838), for this species. Its basionym, Absinthium lagocephalum Fisch. ex Besser, Bull. Soc. Imp. Naturalistes Moscou 7: 233 (1829), has priority before A. kruhsiana. However, Russian authors consider A. lagocephala a species apart from A. kruhsiana (Korobkov 1992, PAF proposal; Krasnoborov 1997). We follow their view.
Korobkov (1987a) described A. kruhsiana with three allopatric to parapatric races in northeastern Asia: subsp. kruhsiana in Chukotka east of the Kolyma River; subsp. multisecta (Leonova) Korobkov in the uppermost reaches of the Kolyma River and south to the Okhotsk Sea (in the meeting zone between A. kruhsiana and A. lagocephala, see Korobkov 1992) but not reaching the Arctic; and subsp. condensata Korobkov in Kharaulakh, the Verkhoyansk Mountains, and northeast of these. Krasnoborov (1997) only entered a collective A. kruhsiana for Siberia as did Korobkov (1992) for the Russian Far East. Hultén (1968b) compared the northwestern North American A. alaskana with the northeastern Asian A. kruhsiana and considered them related but specifically different. He transferred all previous Alaskan records of A. kruhsiana to A. alaskana. Korobkov commented that A. kruhsiana subsp. multisecta seems very close to A. alaskana and might be the same. We have compared northwestern North American and northeastern Asian material and have found only small differences between A. alaskana and A. kruhsiana subsp. kruhsiana. We suspect that Hultén compared with other races than subsp. kruhsiana when he found A. alaskana to be specifically different. We doubt Korobkov's conclusion that A. alaskana is closer to subsp. multisecta. Most Alaskan material is distinctly different from the few specimens (ALA) we have had available of subsp. multisecta, and the disjunction between the Magadan area and Alaska (with subsp. kruhsiana interposed in the gap) would be strange. Our conclusion is that A. alaskana should be considered a part (race) of A. kruhsiana s. lat. We treat it as a subspecies (Elven and Murray 2008b). However, there is an appreciable gap between the westernmost Alaskan occurrences of subsp. alaskana and the easternmost Asian ones of subsp. kruhsiana as the species is absent from the Chukchi Peninsula.
Higher Taxa
- Artemisia [8622,genus]