Karyological knowledge of the Italian vascular flora as inferred by the analysis of “Chrobase.it”

Abstract Chromosome number knowledge of the Italian vascular flora is stored in the online database Chrobase.it, which includes 6723 records, referable to 3428 taxa, 2799 accepted species and subspecies (about 35% of the national flora), and 3410 different chromosome countings (cytotypes). Appropriate queries to Chrobase.it allowed us to calculate mean, modal and median chromosome numbers for the Italian vascular flora, for geographical subgroups (islands, south, centre, north) and for selected orders, families and genera. Chromosome number data were available for 41 out of 55 orders (74%) and 107 out of 428 families (67%), represented by 664 out of 1297 genera (51%). The most studied administrative regions are Sicily (844 taxa), Tuscany (592 taxa), and Sardinia (390 taxa), while the most studied families are Asteraceae (465 taxa), Fabaceae (266 taxa), Brassicaceae (158 taxa), and Poaceae (144 taxa). Chromosome numbers range from 2n = 6, occurring in several species of Hypochaeris (Asteraceae), to 2n = 24...