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Bamboos are large perennial grasses of temperate and tropical forests worldwide. Two general growth
forms exist: the economically and ecologically important woody bamboos (tribes Arundinarieae and
Bambuseae), and the understory herbaceous bamboos (tribe Olyreae). Evolutionary relationships among
the 1400 + described species have been difficult to resolve with confidence. Comparative analysis of bamboo
plastid (chloroplast) DNA has revealed three to five major lineages that show distinct biogeographic
distributions. Taxon sampling across tribes and subtribes has been incomplete and most published data
sets include a relatively small number of nucleotide characters. Branching order among lineages is often
poorly supported, and in more than one study herbaceous bamboos form a clade within the woody bamboos.
In this paper, the Bamboo Phylogeny Group presents the most complete phylogeny estimation to
date of bamboo tribes and subtribes using 6.7 kb of coding and noncoding sequence data and 37 microstructural
characters from the chloroplast genome. Quality of data is assessed, as is the possibility of long
branch attraction, the degree of character conflict at key nodes in the tree, and the legitimacy of three
alternative hypotheses of relationship. Four major plastid lineages are recognized: temperate woody,
paleotropical woody, neotropical woody, and herbaceous bamboos. Woody bamboos are resolved as
paraphyletic with respect to Olyreae but SH tests cannot reject monophyly of woody species
(Arundinarieae + Bambuseae).