Plant Systematics, Third Edition, has made substantial contributions to plant systematics courses at the upper-undergraduate and first year graduate level, with the first edition winning The New York Botanical Garden's Henry Allan Gleason Award for outstanding recent publication in plant taxonomy, plant ecology or plant geography. This third edition continues to provide the basis for teaching an introduction to the morphology, evolution and classification of land plants. A foundation of the approach, methods, research goals, evidence and terminology of plant systematics are presented, along with the most recent knowledge of evolutionary relationships of plants and practical information vital to the field.
In this new edition, the author includes greatly expanded treatments on families of flowering plants, as well as tropical trees (all with full-color plates), and an updated explanation of maximum likelihood and Bayesian inference algorithms. Chapters on morphology and plant nomenclature have also been enhanced with new material.
Table of Contents
UNIT I SYSTEMATICS 1. Plant Systematics: An Overview 2. Phylogenetic SystematicsUNIT II EVOLUTION AND DIVERSITY OF PLANTS 3. Evolution and Diversity of Green and Land Plants 4. Evolution and Diversity of Vascular Plants 5. Evolution and Diversity of Woody and Seed Plants 6. Evolution of Flowering Plants 7. Diversity and Classification of Flowering Plants: Amborellales, Nymphaeales, Austrobaileyales, Magnoliids, Ceratophyllales, and Monocots 8. Diversity and Classification of Flowering Plants: Eudicots
UNIT III SYSTEMATIC EVIDENCE AND DESCRIPTIVE TERMINOLOGY 9. Plant Morphology Chapter 10. Plant Anatomy and Physiology 11. Plant Embryology 12. Palynology 13. Plant Reproductive Biology 14. Plant Molecular Systematics
UNIT IV RESOURCES IN PLANT SYSTEMATICS 15. Plant Identification 16. Plant Nomenclature 17. Plant Collecting and Documentation 18. Herbaria and Data Information Systems
UNIT V SPECIES CONCEPTS AND CONSERVATION BIOLOGY 19. Species and Conservation in Systematics
Appendix 1. Plant Description 2. Botanical Illustrations 3. Scientific Journals in Plant Systematics 4. Statistics and Morphometrics in Plant Systematics
Authors
Michael G. Simpson professor of Biology at San Diego State University, California, USA.Dr. Michael G. Simpson has been a professor of Biology at San Diego State University since 1986. His area of expertise is plant systematics, dealing with the description, identification, naming and classification of plants with the overriding goal of inferring the pattern of evolutionary history (phylogeny). Dr. Simpson has taught courses in Principles of Organismal Biology, Plant Systematics, Taxonomy of California Plants, Economic Botany, Genetics and Evolution, and Seminar in Systematics and Evolution. Additionally, he serves as the Curator of the SDSU Herbarium where he oversees the maintenance, organization, and use of the collection and facilitates additions to the herbarium. Currently, his field work in Chile and Argentina is supported in part by the National Geographic Society.
In addition to publishing numerous articles in technical journals, Dr. Simpson has authored of the widely used textbook Plant Systematics (Elsevier-Academic Press, 2006; 2nd ed. 2010.)
