Abstrakt
Cardamine peruviana, a new species from Cusco (Peru), is described and illustrated, and its relationship and distinguishing features from its closest South American congener, C. geraniifolia, are discussed. From the latter, the novelty differs by having trifoliolate (vs. 3−5-lobed) leaflets.
Cardamine Linnaeus (1753: 654) is a cosmopolitan genus of some 280 species (Šlenker et al. (2021) represented by native species on all continents except Antarctica. South America has 22 native species, of which all except three are restricted to that continent (authors’ compilation).
These are C. bonariensis Persoon (1807 [1806]: 195), C. fulcrata Greene (1897: 155), and C. ovata Bentham (1845: 158), and their ranges extend from South America into Central America (Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama) and S Mexico (Chiapas) (Al-Shehbaz & Fuentes Soriano 2015). The following novelty was noted by one of us (IAS) since 2005 but was not described because the specimen lacked fruiting material.
Unfortunately, no additional collections were seen since. Despite that, its distinctness from all South American species of Cardamine supports its formal recognition as a distinct species.