镰叶肾蕨 lian ye shen jue

Rhizome with dark brown scales. Fronds usually pendulous, thinly herbaceous, both surfaces glabrous; stipe 10-25 cm, with sparse, ovate scales; lamina broadly lanceolate, 60-120 × 9-11 cm, pinnate; basal pinnae distant, small, elliptic, 1.5-2.8 × 1-1.5 cm, base truncate and slightly auriculate, apex rounded; middle pinnae falcate, 5-6 × 1.5-1.8 cm, base truncate and slightly auriculate, apex acuminate. Sori orbicular, ca. 2 mm apart, submarginal; indusia brown, reniform.

Epiphytic on trunks in forests; 600-800 m. Yunnan [Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam; SW Asia, Pacific islands].

This material was treated as Nephrolepis falcata (Cavanilles) C. Christensen in FRPS (6(1): 144. 1999). Although one of us (Hovenkamp) has examined the type and identified it as a Philippine endemic, two of us (Xing and Wang) prefer to use N. falcata, pending further studies.