Plant Systematics

Plant Systematics is a comprehensive and beautifully illustrated text, covering the most up-to-date and essential paradigms, concepts, and terms required for a basic understanding of plant systematics.

This book contains numerous cladograms that illustrate the evolutionary relationships of major plant groups, with an emphasis on the adaptive significance of major evolutionary novelties. It provides descriptions and classifications of major groups of angiosperms, including over 90 flowering plant families; a comprehensive glossary of plant morphological terms, as well as appendices on botanical illustration and plant descriptions. Pedagogy includes review questions, exercises, and references that complement each chapter.

This text is ideal for graduate and undergraduate students in botany, plant taxonomy, plant systematics, plant pathology, ecology as well as faculty and researchers in any of the plant sciences.

• The Henry Allan Gleason Award of The New York Botanical Garden, awarded for "Outstanding recent publication in the field of plant taxonomy, plant ecology, or plant geography" (2006)
• Contains numerous cladograms that illustrate the evolutionary relationships of major plant groups, with an emphasis on the adaptive significance of major evolutionary novelties
• Provides descriptions and classifications of major groups of angiosperms, including over 90 flowering plant families
• Includes a comprehensive glossary of plant morphological terms as well as appendices on botanical illustration and plant description

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.)