Stipa zalesskii Wilenskii, 1921

Nobis, Marcin, Nobis, Agnieszka, Klichowska, Ewelina, Nowak, Arkadiusz, Nowak, Sylwia & Gudkova, Polina D., 2016, Stipa dickorei sp. nov. (Poaceae), three new records and a checklist of feather grasses of China, Phytotaxa 267 (1), pp. 29-39 : 34

Stipa zalesskii Wilenskii

Type:― KAZAKHSTAN. In the vicinity of Saratovka, southern slopes in the regions of Kalyubanov’s country house, 5 June 1918, D. Wilenskii (lectotype selected by Tzvelev (1976: 587), LE!)

Stipa zalesskii is a widely distributed taxon extending from central Europe to the central Asia ( Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia) ( Tzvelev 1976, 2012, Martinovský 1980, Freitag 1985, Conert 1998, Nobis et al. 2016b). Stipa zalesskii was reported from China by Tzvelev (1968) and Cui (1996), but it was omitted by Wu & Phillips (2006). During revision of Stipa material at LE, we came across a specimen of the species collected from Xinjiang. This is the easternmost locality of this taxon. Stipa zalesskii belongs to the section Stipa and is easily distinguishable from other Chinese feather grasses of the section Stipa by having anthecia 17–23 mm long, ventral line of hairs on lemma reaching the base of the awn, vegetative shoots with sheaths shortly pubescent and leaves with a mixture of short and long hairs on the adaxial surface and the abaxial surface scabrous due to hard prickles with a more or less dense admixtue of spinules and/or short hairs ( Nobis et al. 2016b).

Specimens studied:— CHINA. Xinjiang: Dzhungaria border zone, Dzhair Mts., Dzhair pass, by the road from Toli to Otu, high mountain feather grass steppe, 9 September 1957, A.A. Yunatov, S.I. Li, I.F. Yuan 1300 (LE!).