Posts Tagged ‘Oregon Flora Project’
Volume 1 of the Flora of Oregon is Done!
The gorgeous cover art was done by the late Bonnie Hall. We are very grateful her husband Jim allowed us to use her serigraphs of Oregon native plants. I can’t wait to pick out another for the next volume!
Well, at least it is done for me. After almost three years of formatting, editing, designing, doing layout, and making seemingly endless corrections, the Flora of Oregon, Volume 1 is out of my hands and at the printer in Korea! Since 2012, I’ve been working with the Oregon Flora Project (OFP) on the monumental task of creating a new flora specifically for Oregon. It will be the first flora that covers all of Oregon since the unillustrated A Manual of the Higher Plants of Oregon by Morton Peck, first published in 1941. It was quite intimidating at first, putting together what turned out to be a 608-page book with hundreds of illustrations, almost 100 photos, and descriptions of over 1,000 taxa. I didn’t come on board until the actual writing of the Flora was underway, so it was an even more daunting task for the OFP staff, who’d been working on collecting and organizing the data for a couple of decades. Read the rest of this entry »
New Year, New Family Names
Happy 2011! The latest Oregon Flora Newsletter just arrived, and I was pleased to see the Oregon Flora Project is ready to adopt the latest family classifications from the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG). “What is the APG?,” you may be wondering. When I first started pestering the professional botanists around me with questions about who decides what the proper botanical name for a plant is, I was surprised that there didn’t seem to be some governing body making those kinds of decisions. An individual could do research on a plant, decide it should be reclassified, and it was up to others whether they felt the research warranted adopting this new name or classification. So botanical names could be almost as localized as common names.
Fringed grass-of Parnassus (Parnassia fimbriata) is now considered to be a member of Celastraceae. We’ll have to wait and see if it stays there as it has proven a difficult genus to classify.
According to the Wikipedia article, “The Angiosperm Phylogeny Group, or APG, refers to an informal international group of systematic botanists who came together to try to establish a consensus view of the taxonomy of flowering plants (angiosperms) that would reflect new knowledge about their relationships based upon phylogenetic studies.” At last, a single source for plant classification! It seems that most plant authorities are now following the APG classifications, so we can expect more consensus in the future. With all the new genetic-based research bringing so much new information to light, it is a relief to have some central body overseeing classification. Read the rest of this entry »