Plants In Our World Economic Botany

This one-semester text is designed for an upper level botany course. Plants in our World emphasizes how people use plants; including fundamental information on morphology, anatomy, and taxonomy as a foundation of general botany. Now in full color, the fourth edition includes molecular data that has immensely altered the understanding of relationships among flowering plants and recently pinpointed the origin of numerous crops. Taxonomy of species has been updated to discuss the system of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group.

Written for the introductory-level course in Economic Botany, this edition offers more emphasis on key topics like biotechnology and ethnobotany.

Written for the introductory-level course in Economic Botany, this edition offers more emphasis on key topics like biotechnology and ethnobotany.

Given the frequent movement of commercial plants outside their native location, the consistent and standard use of plant names for proper identification and communication has become increasingly important. This second edition of World Economic Plants: A Standard Reference is a key tool in the maintenance of standards for the basic science underlyin

Plants are people too? No, but in this work of philosophical botany Matthew Hall challenges readers to reconsider the moral standing of plants, arguing that they are other-than-human persons. Plants constitute the bulk of our visible biomass, underpin all natural ecosystems, and make life on Earth possible. Yet plants are considered passive and insensitive beings rightly placed outside moral consideration. As the human assault on nature continues, more ethical behavior toward plants is needed. Hall surveys Western, Eastern, Pagan, and Indigenous thought as well as modern science for attitudes toward plants, noting the particular resources for plant personhood and those modes of thought which most exclude plants. The most hierarchical systems typically put plants at the bottom, but Hall finds much to support a more positive view of plants. Indeed, some indigenous animisms actually recognize plants as relational, intelligent beings who are the appropriate recipeints of care and respect. New scientific findings encourage this perspective, revealing that plants possess many of the capacities of sentience and mentality traditionally denied them.

"Provides vivid information about the history of plant exploration, migration, domestication, distribution and crop improvement"--

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.