follows this source with modifications as they become accepted. The Plant List also has lists of genera and species, but no other taxonomic information. History The following taxonomy follows largely the classification system of Robert Louis Dressler, an orchid specialist and adjunct curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History. This classification, published in 1981 in the book The Orchids: Natural History and Classification, was widely accepted by botanists and growers before the publication of Genera Orchidacearum. The initial scheme of 1981 was modified in 1986, twice in 1990, and then again in 1993. This comprehensive classification relies heavily on morphology, especially a few key characters, such as anther configuration and pollinarium structure. Consequently, many of the taxa are not monophyletic. Cladistic analyses, especially those based on molecular data, provide a firmer basis for classification than intuition, and the certainty (or uncertainty) of conclusions can be quantified by measures of statistical support. While our understanding of orchid phylogeny has greatly improved in recent years, the elucidation of orchid relationships is still ongoing. When Dressler published his classification in 1993, the relationships of orchids to other monocots was still unknown. Some of the first molecular phylogenetic studies of monocots resolved the Orchidaceae as sister to the astelioid clade of the order Asparagales, but this result never had strong statistical support. It is now known that Orchidaceae is the most basal clade in Asparagales, with the astelioid clade diverging next. According to cladistic analyses based on morphological character states or on nucleotide sequences, the orchid family is a monophyletic group. The subfamilies recognized by Dressler, however, were not all monophyletic. Dressler's delimitation of subfamilies was contradicted by subsequent studies of mitochondrial, chloroplast, and nuclear DNA sequences. In 2003, a new phylogenetic classification divided Orchidaceae into five subfamilies: Apostasioideae, Vanilloideae, Cypripedioideae, Orchidoideae, and Epidendroideae. These five subfamilies were all strongly supported as monophyletic groups in subsequent studies. In 2003, the position of Vanilloideae remained equivocal. The subfamilies Orchidoideae and Epidendroideae clearly formed a monophyletic group and Dressler believed that their closest relative was Vanilloideae. In 2006, a study based on the plastid genes rbcL and atpB found the closest relative of this pair to be Cypripedioideae, rather than Vanilloideae. This result had only weak maximum parsimony jackknife support, but in a phylogenomic study in 2015, it received strong maximum likelihood bootstrap support. Since 2006, phylogenies of two of the subfamilies, Vanilloideae and Epidendroideae