Comparative morphological analysis of certain Siberian species populations of the Trollius (Ranunculaceae) genus

This work is aimed at searching for marker features and assessing the significance of these morphological characteristics of the flower and basal leaf blade in the process of species identification of some Siberian species of the genus Trollius is assessed. To solve this problem, both classical approaches to the analysis of morphology and modern geometric morphometrics approach were used, which had not previously been widely encountered in the Russian scientific papers. It has been determined that the parameters of the leaf blade actually play a rather important role in classifying a plant to a particular species. Pairwise Tukey tests were conducted for each individual feature and for the totality of all features. For some relative features, including those listed in the literature as taxonomically important, the significance of differences between species has been assessed. Based on the results obtained, the problem of morphological similarity of T. asiaticus and T. kytmanovii has been identified. Statistically significant features have been identified that allow us to resolve the issue of the independence of the T. vitalii and T. kolonok species – the length of the styles and the width of the nectary petals at the base. The interspecific variation of leaf blade shapes has been determined within the framework of geometric morphometry.