Home

Aim of the Portal

The Cichorieae Systematics Portal has been established to provide convenient access to the existing knowledge about this difficult group of plants, based on authoritative phylogenetic and taxonomic information as far as available. It is designed to serve both the specialist and the occasional visitor:

  • offering a classification of the Cichorieae based on the latest phylogenetic and taxonomic research
  • providing a geographically referenced species inventory, with identification keys where available
  • giving taxon accounts with full synonymy, description, images, distributional, ecological and other data
  • instantly integrating new data and research results
  • aiming at an encyclopedic knowledge base of the entire group
  • facilitating cooperation among workers (professionals as well as amateurs) of the group

____________

Statistics of the Cichorieae Systematics Portal (Dec 2022)

  • Accepted genera: 105
  • Accepted species: 7588
      thereof:
      Hieracium: 3011 species and microspecies (apomicts) + 2975 subspecies
      Pilosella: 254 species, microspecies and hybrids
      Taraxacum: 2512 species and microspecies
  • Total number of names treated: 28,303
  • Names of accepted taxa (all ranks): 11,404
  • Names treated as synonyms: 16,899

____________

More on Cichorieae

The Cichorieae – also known as Lactuceae but the name Cichorieae has priority, sometimes also as Liguliflorae – are perhaps the best-studied and most easily recognizable tribe of the sunflower family, the Compositae or Asteraceae, and form, according to the latest backbone phylogeny, a subfamily of its own, Cichorioideae. All members of the tribe have white latex and almost all of them have flower heads with perfect, 5-dentate, mostly yellow, ligulate flowers only. The easy recognition of the Cichorieae comes along with a major drawback: extensive parallel evolution of features makes the recognition of natural groups difficult. This situation has led to considerable differences and instabilities in the classification of the members of the tribe. Consequently one is faced with extensive synonymies and a complicated nomenclature in many groups. In the last years, combined morphological and molecular phylogenetic analyses have clarified considerably the relationships within the Cichorieae. This growing knowledge is continuously being incorporated in the Cichorieae Systematics Portal.

The Cichorieae include 105 genera in the current classification presented here. Of these, 102 genera comprise somewhat more than 1800 species, while 3 genera – hawkweeds and dandelions (Hieracium, Pilosella and Taraxacum) – add more than 5700 species, microspecies (apomicts) and hybrids.

____________

Data model and data sources

This data portal makes full use of the Common Data Model (CDM) Library, a central component of the EDIT Platform for Cybertaxonomy. All taxon pages are created as dynamic webpages from the underlying datastore. The data are being complemented continuously by the International Cichorieae Network.

____________

How to contribute

We invite you to participate in the development of the Cichorieae Systematics Portal by sending us your feedback on and ideas to the portal, or by contributing data or photographs to the portal and becoming a participant of the International Cichorieae Network. Please contact the Editors.

____________

How to cite us

Kilian N., Hand R. & Raab-Straube E. von (general editors) 2009+ (continuously updated):  Cichorieae Systematics Portal. – Published at http://cichorieae.e-taxonomy.net/portal/; accessed [date].

Unless otherwise noted (see images), the content is licensed CC BY 4.0.