Talk:Abies borisii-regis

The identity of this taxon is greatly confused by a serious error made by Farjon in 1993 in naming the wrong specimen as the 'lectotype'; this had already been done by Tang-Shui Liu in his 1971 Monograph of the Genus Abies. Liu states the type is Mattfeld's own collection from the Rhodope in Bulgaria; the specimen chosen by Farjon is from Olimbos, Greece, over 250 km to the southwest. Genetically (e.g. Liepelt et al. 2009, Rev. Palaeobot. Palynol. 153: 139–149; Liepelt et al. 2010, Pl. Syst. Evol. 284: 141–151; Bella et al. 2014, Pl. Syst. Evol. 301: 749–759; Krajmerová et al. 2015, Plant Biosystems 150: 1189-1199), the trees in the latter area are hybrids, but those from the Bulgarian Rhodope are not. All these papers are based on Farjon's erroneous type, not Mattfeld's / Liu's. The result is a major conflict between the taxon originally described by Mattfeld, and the concept of the taxon used in modern publications (maps in these papers actually exclude Mattfeld's type locality from their "Abies × borisii-regis" altogether!) - MPF (talk) 01:36, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

In addition a number of secondary sources, foe example Govaerts, note the name to be a hybrid - Abies x borisii-regis Mattf., Notizbl. Bot. Gart. Berlin-Dahlem 9: 235 (1925) Andyboorman (talk) 16:47, 14 February 2024 (UTC)