Background and Aims:

Among the plants commonly known as weeds are the ruderals, which thrive in human settlements and places with natural or human disturbance. Few studies in Mexico have focused on such plants, although they are an important component of the country’s flora, including many of them are endemics. The aim of this work was to carry out an inventory of the ruderal flora of the Coronango municipality, Puebla, whose territory is currently devoid of original vegetation.

Methods:

Coronango is one of the 217 municipalities that make up the state of Puebla. In order to fulfill the objective, the roadsides of the municipality were covered in the period from October 2017 to October 2018, making collections of plant material that was processed for later identification. Throughout the fieldwork, those species that could already be identified on the site were registered as observations without any further collection. With the field data, an evaluation of the sampling effort was made and the list of ruderal plant species for the municipality was documented.

Key results:

On the roadsides of the municipality 237 ruderal species were recorded, distributed in 46 families and 170 genera. Three of the species identified constitute new records for the state of Puebla. In addition, the presence of 61 exotic (introduced) species was documented, which represents 25.6% of the total flora of the municipality.

Conclusions:

This study contributes to a better knowledge of the flora of the state of Puebla and adds to the few that focus on plants with ruderal behavior. It is also highlighted that even municipalities as Coronango, with a high degree of disturbance and currently lacking original vegetation, register an important component of the state and Mexican flora, which will surely characterize many future environments as the degradation of the original environments continues to increase.

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