Prunus sunhangii is a new synonym of P. itosakura var. ascendens

Prunus sunhangii is a new synonym of P. itosakura var. ascendens

Prunus sunhangii was recently described as an independent species related to P. cerasoides with molecular evidence from ITS and four cpDNA sequences (psbA-trnH, rpS16, trnL-trnF and trnS-trnG). However, while repeating the phylogenetic analysis of P. sunhangii, we found some flaws in the previous analysis, including the extremely long branch of the outgroup and the poor sequence quality, which may affect the reliability of the result. Therefore, a new phylogenetic analysis was performed to verify the identity of P. sunhangii with a new data matrix and morphological comparisons. The results showed that P. sunhangii forms a monophyletic clade with P. itosakura var. ascendens with high support and P. sunhangii is similar with P. itosakura var. ascendens in every morphological aspect. We concluded that P. sunhangii is conspecific with P. itosakura var. ascendens and should be synonymized with the latter species.