Palicourea is a genus of flowering plants in the family Rubiaceae. It contains 694 species, which range from shrubs to small trees, and is distributed throughout the New World tropics.
GENUS
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Palicourea is a genus of flowering plants in the family Rubiaceae. It contains 694 species, which range from shrubs to small trees, and is distributed throughout the New World tropics.
These plants are closely related to Psychotria and in particular its subgenus Heteropsychotria. Indeed, it seems to be nothing else but a distinctively-flowered offshoot of Heteropsychotria; arguably, it would thus need to be merged into Psychotria to make that genus monophyletic. On the other hand, Psychotria is extremely diverse already, so it is probably more practical to move the more distantly related species out of this genus and merge Heteropsychotria with Palicourea. By a Hungarian botanist Attila Borhidi, some of the Psychotria species have been transferred into this genus.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).