Lamiaceae-Associated Puccinia in Uzbekistan: Diversity, Host Associations, Climatic Suitability, and Broader Biogeographic Context

Rust fungi associated with Lamiaceae remain insufficiently documented in Central Asia despite their ecological, taxonomic, and plant-health relevance. We integrated historical literature, re-examined TASM specimens, field surveys (2023–2025), host-name standardisation, occurrence mapping, pooled habitat-suitability modelling, and broader biogeographic screening. The national dataset comprised 207 source-linked occurrence entries documenting 11 Puccinia taxa on 47 reported Lamiaceae host-name entries in 15 genera. Two selected Puccinia menthae vouchers from Mentha longifolia and Origanum tyttanthum were additionally evaluated using LSU (28S rDNA) phylogenetic analyses; both grouped with P. menthae reference sequences (ML bootstrap = 100%; Bayesian posterior probability = 1.00). The pooled MaxEnt dataset contained 64 filtered fungal points from seven taxa, 46 (71.9%) of which were P. menthae; 10-fold cross-validation yielded a mean test AUC of 0.917 ± 0.017. An 18-point P. menthae-excluded sensitivity run remained strongly correlated with the pooled surface (r = 0.910) but showed incomplete spatial overlap (Schoener’s D = 0.794), with 18.9% of valid cells changing suitability class. The pooled host model used 526 preprocessed GBIF records compiled to represent the 15 documented host genera (genus labels were not retained in the archived model input), and the host-association network contained 19 genus-level and 52 host-name-level links. Future suitability surfaces varied among most combinations of SSP scenarios and time periods and were treated as scenario-specific exploratory outputs. Broader screening retained 72 deduplicated nominal Puccinia names (37 secure/strong, 23 caution/sensitive, 12 candidate/transparency-only), with the largest documented pools in West Asia–Eastern Mediterranean–Caucasus (30), Europe (21), Central Asia (16), and East Asia (16). These results establish a conservative national baseline and a transparent framework for future taxonomic, molecular, ecological, biogeographic, and plant-health research.