Diplostephium

Diplostephium is a genus of trees and shrubs in the family Asteraceae.

Diplostephium is distributed on high mountains zones from Venezuela to Chile with the exception of two species in Costa Rica (INBio information system, July 2005) and twelve in the "Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta" (Colombia). It makes part of the high andean forest and the paramo ecosystems. Colombia has the most species with 63 (Vargas & Madriñán, 2006), the majority of them found in the Oriental Cordillera, which has 33 registered species until this moment. Diplostephium is the third most diverse genus on the paramos with 70 species after Pentacalia and Senecio (Luteyn, 1999).