(DC.) Brouillet
Description
Neobrachyactis anomala is a Himalayan composite distributed from Pakistan and Iran eastward through India, Nepal, Bhutan and southern Tibet (China), with around 153 records in GBIF. It is a plant of disturbed and open montane to subalpine ground: rocky slopes, screes, riverbanks, fallow fields, roadsides and forest clearings, generally between about 2500 and 4000 m. The population photographed at Gaushon in Garhwal, India, at around 3000 m in September occupies this kind of late-season, semi-ruderal high-mountain habitat where the species sets seed before winter.
It is an annual or short-lived herb with erect, often branched stems bearing alternate, lanceolate to oblong leaves that are toothed or pinnately lobed and somewhat glandular or hairy. The small heads (capitula) are numerous, arranged in a leafy panicle, each with an involucre of narrow bracts. As the generic relationship to Brachyactis implies, the heads are disciform: the marginal florets are female, filiform and very shortly rayed or rayless, surrounding numerous yellowish bisexual disc florets. The fruit is a small flattened cypsela crowned by a pappus of fine bristles facilitating wind dispersal.
The species was long placed in Brachyactis and allied to Erigeron and Aster, but molecular phylogenetic work in the Astereae led Brouillet to transfer it to the segregate genus Neobrachyactis, reflected in its current author citation. Its annual, ruderal strategy and abundant wind-dispersed achenes suit it to colonising unstable and disturbed alpine terrain. It is widespread and locally common, and as a weedy pioneer it is under no conservation concern; if anything such opportunistic species may expand with increasing human disturbance of mountain landscapes.
Author: (DC.) Brouillet · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of China, Flora of Pakistan, Annotated Checklist of the Flowering Plants of Nepal, Brouillet Systematics of North American Astereae