The species diversity in the genus Silene

The genus Silene is a rich-species with a wide distribution in Northern hemisphere, from temperate to arctic regions. It diversified in Mediterranean area, SW Asia and Central Asia. The genus has been of interest to researchers for ecological, evolutionary, sexual chromosome and genetic studies. Here we retrieve the data of Silene from Plants of the World Online (POWO), the online taxonomic database published by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The R packages (expowo, vegan, tidyr, dplyr and tibble) were used to investigate the Silene diversity, the Alfa diversity and the endemism rates. The database represents 891 species for the genus. The highest species richness belongs to China, Turkey and Iran. In the database, China and Iran include the most endemic species with 133 and 131 species, respectively, and the endemism rates were estimated at 149 and 14.7 for them. The maximum values of richness, Shannon and Simpson with 71, 4.3 and 0.98 belong to China. However, the maximum evenness is one belonging to Afghanistan. The analysis did not demonstrate any endemic species in Turkey. The Principal Coordinate Analysis (PCoA) based on Bray–Curtis dissimilarity represented that Iran (PCoA1 = 0.074, PCoA2 = 0.055) and China (PCoA1 = −0.018, PCoA2 = 0.037) are completely different in species composition. The POWO database provides an opportunity to study large genera. The database is comprehensive resource, and can give us useful information about the distribution, species discovery, richness, evenness and species composition. However, the database needs to improve for some regions like Turkey. Although Turkey is one of the three central diversities of Silene, based on POWO database there are no endemic species in the region. As the PCoA demonstrated the different species composition, Iran harbors the species from the subgenus Silene while China the subgenus Behenantha.