Biology 2191
Plant Taxonomy
Saint Joseph's University
Spring 2009
Instructor: Dr. Karen Snetselaar (email ksnetsel@sju.edu)
Course meets 9-10 am TT in 101 Science Center, lab is Th 1-5 in 210 SC

Welcome to Plant Taxonomy!

I'll try to keep this page up-to-date with quizzes, helpful sites, and other information.   You can review lecture presentations here.  

To see a big project involving cladistics and phylogenetic classification, go to the Tree of Life and browse around for a bit.

To get you started, here's a "Greenhouse Tour" that a group did a few years ago.

There are several excellent sites that you might find helpful in your studies of plant families.  My personal favorite is Dr. Gerry Carr's page of Vascular Plant Families, images and information.  His pictures are fabulous, and you can get to the families by clicking on the appropriate branch in the phylogram! 

The TAMU Flowering Plant Gateway has more than you'll ever want to know about flowering plants, but it is sometimes a little slow.  One nice thing, you can access families arranged according to the Angiosperm Phylogeny Working Group, which is the system we'll be following (more or less).  Also, there is a listing of definitions and drawings of vegetative and floral morphology.  This will be helpful especially at the beginning of the course. 

The Botany Department at the University of Wisconsin also has a great collection of images in the Virtual Foliage Page, organized by division, subclass, family, etc.  Go to the Plant Diversity section.  There is also a nice selection of general Botany images you may find useful. 

Also try the Guide to Flowering Plant Families or the synoptic Flowering Plant Family Key from Colby College.  (Note, however, that some resources may be using a different taxonomic system than the one we are using, and it might be a little harder to locate the images you want.)  I'll use some of these images in class, and some of the quiz images also come from these sites.  Let me know if you find any other good sites!
 


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