Phytotaxa 409 (4): 189–201 https://www.mapress.com/j/pt/ Copyright © 2019 Magnolia Press Article PHYTOTAXA ISSN 1179-3155 (print edition) ISSN 1179-3163 (online edition) Accepted by Samantha Karunarathna: 17 Feb. 2019; published: 12 Jul. 2019 https://doi.org/10.11646/phytotaxa.409.4.1 189 Amanita mansehraensis, a new species in section Vaginatae from Pakistan MALKA SABA 1,2,3 , DANNY HAELEWATERS 3,4 , MUHAMMAD FIAZ 5 , ABDUL NASIR KHALID 2 & DONALD H. PFISTER 3 1 Current affiliation: Department of Plant Sciences, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, 45320, Pakistan. 2 Department of Botany, University of the Punjab, Quaid-e-Azam Campus, Lahore 54590, Pakistan. 3 Farlow Reference Library and Herbarium of Cryptogamic Botany, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 4 Current affiliation: Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA. 5 Department of Botany, Hazara University, Mansehra, Pakistan. Correspondence to: rustflora@gmail.com; drmalka.saba@uog.edu.pk Abstract A new species of Amanita subgenus Amanita sect. Vaginatae is described and illustrated based on material collected in pine forests in district Mansehra, Khyber Pakhtoonkhaw, Pakistan. Amanita mansehraensis is recognized by the presence of a light brown or light greyish olive pileus with strong brown or deep brown pileus center; non-appendiculate, rimose, sulcate or plicate striate pileus margin; subglobose to ellipsoid basidiospores; and a saccate volva. The internal transcribed spacer region (ITS) and large subunit of the nuclear ribosomal RNA gene (nrLSU) were used for the delimitation of this species based on sequence data. The evolutionary relationships of A. mansehraensis with other species of Amanita were inferred by means of Maximum Likelihood and Bayesian inferences of the nrLSU dataset and concatenated ITS+nrLSU dataset. Ama- nita mansehraensis is most closely related to A. brunneofuliginea, A. pseudovaginata, and the recently described A. glarea. Keywords: Amanitaceae, Ectomycorrhizae, Phylogeny, Pine Forests, Taxonomy Introduction Amanita Pers. (1794: 145) (Basidiomycota, Agaricomycetes, Agaricales) is a large genus that includes ca. 868 described taxa (Tulloss 2017). It contains both poisonous and edible mushrooms (Bas 1969). Most species of Amanita are ectomycorrhizal (ECM) with several vascular plants, and therefore play an important role in forest ecosystems (Yang 1997, 2005). Since the 1990s, several reports of Amanita spp. from Pakistan were made, and several species have been described based on Pakistani material. However, no list is available of all taxa known for this country. Only 21 species of this genus are known from Pakistan; we summarized these in Table 1. The genus is divided into two subgenera, subgenus Amanita and subg. Lepidella (E.-J. Gilbert) Veselý, based on the reaction of basidiospore walls with Melzer’s reagent and some other characters (Cui et al. 2018). Members of subg. Amanita include species that are characterized by a non-bulbous stipe base (Corner & Bas 1962, Bas 1969). This subgenus is divided further into three sections: sect. Amanita, sect. Caesareae Singer ex Singer and sect. Vaginatae (Fr.) Qúel. sensu stricto (Yang 1997). Sect. Vaginatae includes those species that lack an annulus and clamp connections at the base of basidia (Yang 1997, 2005). However, certain African and South Asian (Bangladesh) species in this section possess an annulus (Tang et al. 2015). These are Amanita annulatovaginata var. citrina Beeli, A. infusca sensu Pegler & Shah-Sm., A. loosii Beeli, A. madagascariensis L.P. Tang, Zhu L. Yang & B. Buyck, A. mafingensis Härk. & Saarim., A. masasiensis Härk. & Saarim., A. strobilaceovolvata Beeli, and a number of undescribed species. Tulloss & Yang (2019) list 335 species under sect. Vaginatae, including 64 as nom. prov. and 133 unnamed ones. During the exploration of Pakistani ectomycorrhizal fungi associated with Pinus species during 2014–2017, three collections from different localities in the Mansehra district were examined and identified morphologically in combination with molecular sequence data. Based on these analyses, a new species, A. mansehraensis, is described and placed in Amanita sect. Vaginatae. The morphological characters of this new species are compared with those of the closely related taxa, and its phylogenetic placement is assessed using large nuclear ribosomal RNA gene (nrLSU) sequences and a combined dataset of internal transcribed spacer (ITS) and nrLSU sequences. Due to high success rates