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!