Page 676 - e-Book

Leaf architecture was greatly used in systematic studies to delimit the genera and

species in families like Rosaceae, Araceae, Lauraceae etc. (Merriell, 1978; Klucking, 1987;
Hyland, 1989; Ray, 1992). Leaf architecture studies were done on the genus Ficus (Kumar &

Jain, 1986; Loutfy, 2005). Phenetic analysis on the leaves of 12 Ficus species was done in the
present study to understand the clustering pattern. Also, to check whether the leaf

morphology-based clustering is similar to the current subgeneric system of classification.

METHODOLOGY

12 species of Ficus each belonging to different subgenera, present in the Southern
Western Ghats region were selected for the study. The selected species and the respective

subgenus (Berg, 2003; Berg and Corner, 2005) are provided in table 1.

Sl. No Species Subgenus
1 Ficus callosa Wild. Pharmacosycea

2 Ficus nervosa Heyne ex Roth Pharmacosycea

3 Ficus tinctoria. ssp. parasitica (J. Koenig ex wild.) Corner. Sycidium
4 Ficus auriculata Lour. Sycomorus

5 Ficus binnendijkii (Miq.) Miq. Sycomorus

6 Ficus racemosa L. Sycomorus
7 Ficus amplocarpa Govind. & Masil. Synoecia

8 Ficus guttata (Wight) Kurzex Hook. Synoecia
9 Ficus pumila L. Synoecia

10 Ficus benjamina L. Urostigma

11 Ficus microcarpa L.f. Urostigma
12 Ficus talbotii King. Urostigma

Table 1. Selected species of Ficus and their sub genus.

The morphological characters of the leaves were observed and documented (Fig 1).
Sixteen characters and 102-character states were considered for the study (Table 2).

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