I had the honor to be invited to speak at the 2018 World Bromeliad Conference in San Diego, California, along with other colleagues with interesting and enriching talks. My presentation in particular focused on the way people who classify plants work. I used my study group, Hechtia, as a way to illustrate the steps we follow in our research. Thus, here is the story.

Bromeliaceae, as you know, is a Neotropical group in its natural distribution regardless of its presence around the World, where it is cultivated for the beauty of its species. Plant taxonomists like myself, study and identify them. We are also interested, besides assigning correct names to each species, in many other biological and evolutionary features: how they evolved, what characters have changed along their evolutionary history, where they come from, etc., just as we are concerned about our own origins and from whom we inherited some features, such as our nose, eye color, or even our bad temper!

Tracing back our origins (place and time) and specific character inheritance is relatively easy since we have documentation and relatives to ask, right? We can even request an in-depth analysis of our DNA. But how can we have the same information about other organisms that lack birth certificates or communication skills? This is when we become detectives! We need, as detectives do, information from different sources of evidence in order to reconstruct the evolutionary history of organisms, in the same way detectives decipher a crime from evidence on the crime scene and testimonies from witnesses. Since we did not witness ourselves the rise of species and their evolution, just as a detective did not witness a crime, we have to accumulate evidence, analyze it carefully and propose the best sustainable hypothesis of relationships, place and time of origin and evolution of selected characters.

Working with a plant group, let us say Hechtia, until now the only genus of the subfamily Hechtioideae, involves the gathering of all available evidence. We start with the information in the original publication of the species, in other words, the original description of the species (these are called protologues), then we study herbarium material (we call them vouchers or types) and of course, as good detectives, we evaluate information coming from different sources: morphology, anatomy, cytology, fragrances, floral biology, pollinators, and sequences of DNA fragments, in the same way a detective interrogates all witnesses: expressly, all sources of evidence, from morphology to genes are "our witnesses". All gathered information should allow us, first to circumscribe species and, second, by performing particular analyses, to reconstruct the phylogenetic relationships of species (similar to a family tree). Easy to say, sometimes hard to do when it comes to hechtias!

Are you familiar with plants...