Plant Gateway S The Global Flora

This volume includes an introduction to The Global Flora series and an overview of an angiosperm poster. The poster visually illustrates relationships of all angiosperm families (following APG IV) and flower images representing 269 plant families. The poster also lists important characters for major grades and clades.

Plants of the World is the first book to systematically explore every vascular plant family on earth—more than four hundred and fifty of them—organized in a modern phylogenetic order. Detailed entries for each family include descriptions, distribution, evolutionary relationships, and fascinating information on economic uses of plants and etymology of their names. All entries are also copiously illustrated in full color with more than 2,500 stunning photographs. A collaboration among three celebrated botanists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Plants of the World is authoritative, comprehensive, and beautiful. Covering everything from ferns to angiosperms, it will be an essential resource for practicing botanists, horticulturists, and nascent green thumbs alike.

This flora treatment covers the Amborellaceae family which is endemic to New Caledonia and contains one species in one genus. An overview of the family is provided with notes on distribution, classification, wood anatomy and pollen morphology. The sole species in the family is illustrated and comes with a description including data on its habitat, known herbarium specimens at major herbaria, distribution map and additional observations.

This is the first volume in the new multi-volume set, Global Biodiversity. Each volume in this series aims to provide insightful information on the biodiversity of selected nations in particular regions. The volumes summarize the available data on both wild and cultivated plants, wild and domesticated animals, and microbes of the different nations. Global Biodiversity, Volume 1: Selected Countries in Asia focuses on selected countries of Asia, providing an abundance of biodiversity information on Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, and Vietnam. The first chapter in the volume provides an informative overview of what is biodiversity along with biogeographic classifications. It provides explanations of biodiversity patterns and species number; biodiversity conservation, protection, and international commitments and cooperation; biodiversity threats and drivers of change (such as human population growth, climate change, land use change); and the economics of biodiversity as well.

Phylogenetics often uncovers contradicting hypotheses regarding the relationships within the same group of organisms, a phenomenon known since the beginning of the molecular systematics era. While, historically, single marker-based analyses produced discordance, nowadays entire cellular genomes or portions of the same genomic compartment conflict with others or the rest, respectively. In contrast to the beginning of the molecular systematics era, when adding markers and taxa offered a way out of systematic errors, genome inference-based incongruences cannot be addressed and explained easily. Disagreeing phylogenomic hypotheses might originate from various evolutionary processes, including but not limited to hybridization or incomplete lineage sorting, thereby leading to gene tree-versus species tree-associated discrepancies. Today, this can be expanded to genome discordance, where phylogenomic signals of organellar genomes (plastid, mitochondrial) and the nuclear genome disagree due to intrinsically different coalescent paths or phenomena like organelle capture.

Land of Plants in Motion is the first in any language to examine two companion stories: (1) the rise of an East Asian floristic zone and how the Japanese islands evolved an astonishing wealth of plant species, and (2) the growth of Japanese botanical sciences. The majority of plant species regarded as “Japanese” trace their origins to western China and the eastern Himalaya but are so indigenized that they often seem native today. Early modern scientists in Japan drew on knowledge of Chinese herbal medicine but achieved distinctive insights into plant life commensurate with but separate from their European counterparts. Scholars at the University of Tokyo pioneered Japanese plant biology in the late nineteenth century. They incorporated Western botanical methods but sought a degree of difference in taxonomy while also gaining international legitimacy through publications in English. Japan’s age of empire (1895–1945) was less about plant exploration and more about plant collection, for both scientific and economic benefits. Displays of species from throughout the empire made Japan’s sphere of colonization and conquest visible at home. The infrastructure for research and instruction expanded slowly after World War Two: new laboratories, botanical gardens, scholarly societies, and publications eventually allowed for great diversity of specialized study, especially with the growth of molecular biology in the 1970s and DNA research in the 1980s. Basic research was harmed by cuts in government funding during 2012–2017, but Japanese plant biologists continue to enjoy international esteem in many fields of scholarship.