A new Serbian endemic species of the genus Crocus (Iridaceae)

Recent research within the genus Crocus (Iridaceae) let us doubt that Crocus adamii Gay from Serbia represents the same taxon as C. adamii s. str. of the locus classicus in the Caucasian Mountains. The latter belongs to a group of crocuses, which is distributed from the Anatolian Diagonal, a mountain belt in inner Anatolia, to Iran and the Caucasian Mountains. To infer (i) if the Serbian C. adamii represents a new species and (ii) its taxonomical and phylogenetic affiliation within the genus we combined morphological and molecular investigations. The results show the presence of a morphologically and molecularly differentiated lineages, which both share a close relationship e.g. to C. alexandrii, C. chrysanthus, and C. weldenii but not to C. adamii s. str., which indicates a new species. As a result, we here describe C. randjeloviciorum to honor the Serbian botanists Novica and Vladimir Ranđelović.