Following Percival, Flaksberger, Mac Key, Dorofeev and Korovina, Goncharov, and Hammer a new monograph, reviewing all taxa and their names for the wheat genus Triticum L. has been prepared. Its structure is as a taxonomic revision, with “evidence” starting in 1753 (Linnaeus’s Species plantarum), and that separates taxa from names, the application of which is ruled by types and provisions of the International Code of Nomenclature. Addressed challenges are: (1) document all names ever published in Triticum; (2) decide their status (valid, illegitimate, invalid); (3) devise concepts to decide which taxa – and thus which names – are included and which are not; (4) establish the types of the accepted names thereby providing a reference for their application; (5) provide a classification that reflects a phylogeny complicated by hybridisation, allopolyploidisation, domestication and selection (schemes by Li & Gill and by Goncharov are adopted with slight modification), and (6) provide a “practical” solution in order to be accepted. Illustrative are 93 “Grey Zone” taxa (extending Goncharov’s sect. Compositum) that are part of the wheat gene pool but not accepted in the genus (see below).

Two concepts support the classification: (1) “the genus consists only of cultivated species and their direct wild relatives, together forming ‘Gene Pool 1’ (GP-1, sensu Harlan & De Wet 1971) of wheat”, and (2) “each accepted cultivated taxon is the total of all cultivars created within it, held together by a botanical name with an associated type”. The result is simple and flexible but still reflects ploidy level, evolution and selection processes. In two versions: 5 species with 13 nontypical subspecies using additional genome-definition (the presentation in the monograph), or the 5 + 13 all as species. The latter appears the implicit concept of earlier overviews, bar MacKey’s concept of wheat as “A genome and its polyploids” that included triticale. However, the idea of a “crop within a crop” is rejected. Not included are: 708 Triticum taxa that taxonomically not belong there, archaeological and theoretical/evolutionary “species”, “Grey Zone” taxa representing mutations or created/natural autoploids and amphiploids derived from accepted (sub-) species, and 1873 (and counting) microtaxa within the 18 accepted ones (cultivated ones actually representing landraces and cultivars). The wheat gene pool consists of 2,014 taxa but the wheat genus consists of only 22 (1 genus, 3 sections, 18 (sub) species).