Presents an updated system of classification of flowering plants which retains the author's innovation of dividing flowering plants into the subclasses, a now-widely accepted idea he first proposed in A System and Phylogeny of the Flowering Plants (1967). Modifications and some major changes which have taken place since 1967 are incorporated into the present volume. Changes include new taxonomic revisions of large groups, including families; changes inspired by new comparative- morphological studies of various groups; and new ideas based on the rapidly increasing number of molecular taxonomic studies. Descriptions are included in keys to families. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
The culmination of more than fifty years of research by the foremost living expert on plant classification, Diversity and Classification of Flowering Plants is an important contribution to the field of plant taxonomy. In the last decade, the system of classifying plants has been thoroughly revised. Instead of describing every individual family, Takhtajan includes descriptions in keys to families, which he calls "descriptive keys." The advantage of descriptive keys is that they give both the characteristic features of the families and their differences. The delimitation of families and orders drastically differs from the one accepted by the Englerian school and from the one accepted in Arthur Cronquist's system. Takhtajan favors the smaller, more natural families and orders, which are more coherent and better-defined, where characters are easily grasped, and which are more suitable for information retrieval and phylogenetic studies, including cladistic analysis (because it reduces polymorphic codings).
The culmination of more than fifty years of research by the foremost living expert on plant classification, Diversity and Classification of Flowering Plants is an important contribution to the field of plant taxonomy.
