Plastome Super-Barcoding Readiness of the Flora of Poland: Coverage, Provenance, and the Resolution Gap
TL;DR
This work assesses how ready the flora of Poland is for plastome-based super-barcoding by combining national checklists of vascular plants, mosses, and liverworts with the current availability of complete plastomes in GenBank, and identifies 1011 high-value sequencing targets and recommends a tiered, marker-aware strategy.
Abstract
Reliable molecular identification of plants depends on reference libraries of DNA sequences, and complete plastid genomes (plastomes) used as super-barcodes are increasingly the reference of choice for taxonomically difficult groups. We assess how ready the flora of Poland is for plastome-based super-barcoding by combining national checklists of vascular plants, mosses, and liverworts with the current availability of complete plastomes in GenBank. For 3339 species we quantify coverage, its distribution across families and genera, the provenance of the sequenced material, and the gap between coverage and expected species-level resolution. A complete plastome was available for 54.4% of species, but coverage was uneven: liverworts (76.0%) and mosses (75.6%) were close to reference-complete, whereas the much larger vascular flora reached only 45.9%. Effective vascular coverage fell to roughly 39% once low-resolution genera were excluded, because many uncovered species belong to apomictic or hybridogenous complexes such as Taraxacum, Hieracium, and Alchemilla, where plastomes alone cannot resolve identity. Most sequenced material was of non-European origin, which weakens fine-scale identification of local populations. We identify 1011 high-value sequencing targets and recommend a tiered, marker-aware strategy combining the plastome with nuclear ribosomal DNA and, selectively, low-copy nuclear or mitochondrial markers. Defining readiness by the proportion of the flora that can actually be identified turns a static inventory into a prioritized roadmap transferable to other Central European floras.