Botany · Ch 5 — Taxonomy and Systematic Botany
Modern trends in taxonomy
Modern trends in taxonomy
Taxonomists now agree that morphological characters alone are not sufficient for systematic classification of plants - a complete taxonomy draws on the principles of many disciplines: Cytology, Genetics, Anatomy, Physiology, Geographical Distribution, Embryology, Ecology, Palynology, Phenology, Biochemistry, Numerical Taxonomy and Transplant Experiments. These additional characters have solved taxonomic problems that morphology alone could not, marking the shift from alpha (classical) taxonomy to omega (modern …
What this figure shows. A bar chart (source: Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, State of the World's Plants 2017) plotting the total number of angiosperm families recognised, in chronological order, by each major system - Bentham & Hooker (1883), Engler & Prantl (1915), Arthur Cronquist (1981), APG I (1998), APG II (2003), APG III (2009) and APG IV (2016) - illustrating how the recognised family count has shifted across successive classification systems. …