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The Diversity and Evolution of Plants

Author: Lorentz C. Pearson

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2023-08-11

Total Pages: 682

ISBN-13: 1000947106

This exciting new textbook examines the concepts of evolution as the underlying cause of the rich diversity of life on earth-and our danger of losing that rich diversity. Written as a college textbook, The Diversity and Evolution of Plants introduces the great variety of life during past ages, manifested by the fossil record, using a new natural classification system. It begins in the Proterozoic Era, when bacteria and bluegreen algae first appeared, and continues through the explosions of new marine forms in the Helikian and Hadrynian Periods, land plants in the Devonian, and flowering plants in the Cretaceous. Following an introduction, the three subkingdoms of plants are discussed. Each chapter covers one of the eleven divisions of plants and begins with an interesting vignette of a plant typical of that division. A section on each of the classes within the division follows. Each section describes where the groups of plants are found and their distinguishing features. Discussions in each section include phylogeny and classification, general morphology, and physiology, ecological significance, economic uses, and potential for research. Suggested readings and student exercises are found at the end of each chapter.

Diversity and Evolution of Land Plants

Author: M. Ingrouille

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9401123004

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Diversity and Evolution of Land Plants provides a fresh and long overdue treatment of plant anatomy and morphology for the biology undergraduate of today. Setting aside the traditional plod through the plant taxa, the author adopts a problem-based functional approach, exploring plant diversity as a series of different solutions to the design problems facing plant life on land.

Plant Diversity and Evolution

Author: Robert J. Henry

Publisher: Cabi

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780851999043

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Importance of plant diversity; Relationships between the families of flowering plants; Diversity and evolution of gymnosperms; Chloroplast genomes of plants; The mitochondrial genome of higher plants: a target for natural adaptation; Reticulate evolution in higher plants; Crucifer evolution in the post-genomic era; Genetic variation in plant populations: assessing cause an pattern; Evolution of the flower; Diversity in plant cell walls; Diversity in secondary metabolism in plants; Ecological importance of species diversity; Genomic diversity in nature and domestication; Conserving genetic diversity in plants of environmental, social or economic importance.

Plant Evolution in the Mediterranean

Author: John D. Thompson

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2005-02-10

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780198515340

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Plant Evolution in the Mediterranean integrates a diverse and scattered literature to produce a synthetic account of plant evolutionary ecology. The central theme is differentiation, both among and within species in the contemporary flora of the Mediterranean basin. This approach is developed by attempting to link population processes to species evolution, and by examining the variation and evolution of ecological function in the context of spatial habitat variation and regional history. This accessible text explores the evolutionary processes which have shaped plant evolution in the context of these major influences on vegetation.

Diversity and Evolutionary Biology of Tropical Flowers

Author: Peter K. Endress

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1996-07-25

Total Pages: 530

ISBN-13: 9780521565103

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A unique account of the structure, biology and evolution of tropical flowering plants.

Plant Evolution

Author: Karl J. Niklas

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-08-12

Total Pages: 590

ISBN-13: 022634228X

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Although plants comprise more than 90% of all visible life, and land plants and algae collectively make up the most morphologically, physiologically, and ecologically diverse group of organisms on earth, books on evolution instead tend to focus on animals. This organismal bias has led to an incomplete and often erroneous understanding of evolutionary theory. Because plants grow and reproduce differently than animals, they have evolved differently, and generally accepted evolutionary views—as, for example, the standard models of speciation—often fail to hold when applied to them. Tapping such wide-ranging topics as genetics, gene regulatory networks, phenotype mapping, and multicellularity, as well as paleobotany, Karl J. Niklas’s Plant Evolution offers fresh insight into these differences. Following up on his landmark book The Evolutionary Biology of Plants—in which he drew on cutting-edge computer simulations that used plants as models to illuminate key evolutionary theories—Niklas incorporates data from more than a decade of new research in the flourishing field of molecular biology, conveying not only why the study of evolution is so important, but also why the study of plants is essential to our understanding of evolutionary processes. Niklas shows us that investigating the intricacies of plant development, the diversification of early vascular land plants, and larger patterns in plant evolution is not just a botanical pursuit: it is vital to our comprehension of the history of all life on this green planet.

Plant Evolution under Domestication

Author: Gideon Ladizinsky

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 940114429X

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This book emerged from a series of lectures on crop evolution at the Faculty of Agriculture of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. While many textbooks are available on general evolution, only a few deal with evolution under domestication. This book is a modest attempt to bridge this gap. It was written for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of crop evolution, ethnobotany, plant breeding and related subjects. Evolution under domestication is unique in the general field of plant evolution for three main reasons: (a) it is recent, having started not much more than 10 000 years ago with the emergence of agri culture; (b) the original plant material, i. e. the wild progenitors of many important crop plants, still grow in their natural habitats; (c) man played in this process. These factors enable a more reliable a major role assessment of the impact of different evolutionary forces such as hybridization, migration, selection and drift under new circumstances. Interestingly, a great part of evolution under domestication has been unconscious and a result of agricultural practices which have created a new selection criteria, mostly against characters favored by natural selec tion. Introducing crop plants to new territories exposed them to different ecological conditions enhancing selection for new characters. Diversity in characters associated with crop plants evolution is virtually absent in theit wild progenitors and most of it has evolved under domestication.

Molecular Systematics and Plant Evolution

Author: Peter M. Hollingsworth

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 1999-08-19

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 9781439833278

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Molecular Systematics and Plant Evolution discusses the diversity and evolution of plants with a molecular approach. It looks at population genetics, phylogeny (history of evolution) and developmental genetics, to provide a framework from which to understand evolutionary patterns and relationships amongst plants. The international panel of contributors are all respected systematists and evolutionary biologists, who have brought together a wide range of topics from the forefront of research while keeping the text accessible to students. It has been written for senior undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in the fields of botany, systematics, population / conservation genetics, phylogenetics and evolutionary biology.

Plant Diversity and Ecology in the Chihuahuan Desert

Author: Maria C. Mandujano

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-07-18

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 3030449637

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Environmental and specific diversity in the Chihuahuan desert in general, and in the Cuatro Ciénegas Basin in particular, has long been recognized as outstanding. This book provides a global ecological overview, together with in-depth studies of specific processes. The Chihuahuan desert is the warmest in North America, and has a complex geologic, climatic and biogeographical history, which affects today’s distribution of vegetation and plants and generates complex phylogeographic patterns. The high number of endemic species reflects this complex set of traits. The modern distribution of environments, including aquatic and subaquatic systems, riparian environments, gypsum dunes and gypsum-rich soils, low levels of phosphorous and organic matter, and high salinity combined with an extreme climate call for a range of adaptations. Plants are distributed in a patchy pattern based on punctual variations, and many of them respond to different resources and conditions with considerable morphological plasticity. In terms of physiological, morphological and ecological variability, cacti were identified as the most important group in specific environments like bajadas, characterized by high diversity values, while gypsophytes and gypsovagues of different phylogenies, including species with restricted distribution and endemics.

Demons in Eden

Author: Jonathan Silvertown

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-11-15

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 0226757773

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At the heart of evolution lies a bewildering paradox. Natural selection favors above all the individual that leaves the most offspring—a superorganism of sorts that Jonathan Silvertown here calls the "Darwinian demon." But if such a demon existed, this highly successful organism would populate the entire world with its own kind, beating out other species and eventually extinguishing biodiversity as we know it. Why then, if evolution favors this demon, is the world filled with so many different life forms? What keeps this Darwinian demon in check? If humankind is now the greatest threat to biodiversity on the planet, have we become the Darwinian demon? Demons in Eden considers these questions using the latest scientific discoveries from the plant world. Readers join Silvertown as he explores the astonishing diversity of plant life in regions as spectacular as the verdant climes of Japan, the lush grounds of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, the shallow wetlands and teeming freshwaters of Florida, the tropical rainforests of southeast Mexico, and the Canary Islands archipelago, whose evolutionary novelties—and exotic plant life—have earned it the sobriquet "the Galapagos of botany." Along the way, Silvertown looks closely at the evolution of plant diversity in these locales and explains why such variety persists in light of ecological patterns and evolutionary processes. In novel and useful ways, he also investigates the current state of plant diversity on the planet to show the ever-challenging threats posed by invasive species and humans. Bringing the secret life of plants into more colorful and vivid focus than ever before, Demons in Eden is an empathic and impassioned exploration of modern plant ecology that unlocks evolutionary mysteries of the natural world.