The fern genus Dryopterisis represented worldwide by approximately 225 species. In the Hawaiian Islands, all but one species of Dryopterisare endemic. Past investigators have suggested that the Dryopterisspecies diversity observed in Hawaii resulted from multiple, successful colonization events to the Hawaiian archipelago. We collected DNA sequence data from two chloroplast regions, the rbcLgene and the trnF-trnLintergenic spacer. Preliminary phylogenetic analyses from rbcLsequence data suggest that Hawaiian Dryopterisis not a monophyletic group. One of two non-Hawaiian Dryopterisspecies, D. dickinsii,included in the analysis arises on the tree from amongst Hawaiian species, suggesting that there were at least 2 separate introductions of Dryopterisin Hawaii. Maximum parsimony analyses of the trnF-trnLintergenic spacer strongly suggest that two distinct clades exist within Hawaiian Dryopteris.Additionally, one clade appears to be more closely related to a non-DryopterisHawaiian species, Nothoperanema rubiginosa,than to other species of the same genus. This may suggest that the ancestral species that gave rise to each of these groups were themselves distantly related, that N. rubiginosais simply misclassified, or that intergenic spacer sequences do no reflect species-level phylogeny.

Key words: biogeography, Dryopteridaceae, Dryopteris, Hawaii, phylogenetic systematics