Wood anatomy of korean symplocos jacq. (symplocaceae)

Despite poorly documented species delimitation and unresolved taxonomic nomenclature, four species of Symplocos (S. coreana, S purnifolia, S sawafutagi, and S. tanakana) have been described in Korea. In this study, we carried a comparative wood anatomy analysis of all four species of Korean Symplocos to understand the wood anatomical variations among them. The results of this study indicated that Korean Symplocos are com-paratively indistinguishable in terms of their qualitative wood features, except for exclusively uniseriate rays present in S. purnifolia instead of uniseriate to multiseriate in other three species. Nevertheless, differences are noticed in quantitative wood variables such as the vessel density, vessel size, and ray density. The vessel density of S. purnifolia is more than twice as high as those of S. sawafutagi and S. tanakana. In contrast, the vessel circumference and diameter on both plants of S. sawafutagi and S. tanakana is nearly twice as large as those of S. purnifolia. Sym-plocos coreana has characteristic intermediacy between these two groups in terms of vessel features and is closer to S. purnifolia in terms of its ray density level. A cluster analysis based on a paired group (unweighted pair-group method with the arithmetic mean, UPGMA) algorithm using the Euclidean similarity index clearly differentiates S. purnifolia from the remaining species, representing the first branch of the phenogram.