9. Tribe Plucheeae Anderb.

About 28 genera, about 220 species, nearly worldwide, but most diverse in tropical regions.

This relatively small but widely distributed tribe contains species ranging from annual herbs to trees. Steyermark (1963), Cronquist (1980), Gleason and Cronquist (1963, 1991), Barkley (1986), and most earlier authors treated the Plucheeae as a subtribe of a broadly circumscribed Inuleae along with genera here classified in the Gnaphalieae, although some of the tropical genera in the currently circumscribed Plucheeae originally were classified in the Vernonieae. The decision to dismember the Inuleae into three smaller tribes has been supported by recent analyses of molecular data sets (Panero and Funk, 2002) but was suggested originally based on differences in subtle morphological details, such as stylar ultrastructure (Bremer, 1987, 1994). This classification remains somewhat controversial and at least one recent molecular study (Anderberg et al., 2005) suggested that the Plucheeae may best be considered a subtribe of the Inuleae.