Paul Wilkin - Böcker

Tracing the evolution of one of the most ancient major branches of flowering plants, this is a wide-ranging survey of state-of-the-art research on the early clades of the monocot phylogenetic tree. It explores a series of broad but linked themes, providing for the first time a detailed and coherent view of the taxa of the early monocot lineages, how they diversified and their importance in monocots as a whole. Featuring contributions from leaders in the field, the chapters trace the evolution of the monocots from largely aquatic ancestors. Topics covered include the rapidly advancing field of monocot fossils, aquatic adaptations in pollen and anther structure and pollination strategies and floral developmental morphology. The book also presents a new plastid sequence analysis of early monocots and a review of monocot phylogeny as a whole, placing in an evolutionary context a plant group of major ecological, economic and horticultural importance.

Dioscoreales are a small but systematically and economically significant order of monocotyledons. The most diverse and important member is the yam genus, Dioscorea L., a source of dietary starch at macroeconomic to rural community levels. Other species of Dioscorea provide the chemical basis of corticosteroid drugs and oral contraceptives. Ally families comprise the unusual, largely achlorophyllous (heteromycotrophic) Burmanniaceae and the relatively unspecialised Nartheciaceae. The World Checklist of Dioscoreales lists all validly published names of yams and their allies, providing the source of their publication and indicating which names are currently accepted and which are synonyms, making it a standard nomenclatural reference for further research into this important family.

This book discusses innovative methods for mining information from images of plants, especially leaves, and highlights the diagnostic features that can be implemented in fully automatic systems for identifying plant species. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, it explores the problem of plant species identification, covering both the concepts of taxonomy and morphology. It then provides an overview of morphometrics, including the historical background and the main steps in the morphometric analysis of leaves together with a number of applications. The core of the book focuses on novel diagnostic methods for plant species identification developed from a computer scientist’s perspective. It then concludes with a chapter on the characterization of botanists' visions, which highlights important cognitive aspects that can be implemented in a computer system to more accurately replicate the human expert’s fixation process. The book not only represents an authoritative guide to advanced computational tools for plant identification, but provides experts in botany, computer science and pattern recognition with new ideas and challenges. As such it is expected to foster both closer collaborations and further technological developments in the emerging field of automatic plant identification.