Botany

A revised and updated classification for the families of flowering plants is provided. Many recent studies have yielded increasingly detailed evidence for the positions of formerly unplaced families, resulting in a number of newly adopted orders,…

Conservationists are far from able to assist all species under threat, if only for lack of funding. This places a premium on priorities: how can we support the most species at the least cost? One way is to identify 'biodiversity hotspots' where…

A formal classification of the land plants that is compatible with the APG III classification is proposed. Previous classifications inflated taxonomic ranks, particularly of the angiosperms. If the major clades of green algae are recognized as…

There is growing recognition that classifying terrestrial plant species on the basis of their function into 'functional types') rather than their higher taxonomic identity, is a promising way forward for tackling important ecological questions at…

O termo fitofisionomia foi proposto praticamente ao mesmo tempo que o termo formação. O termo bioma, proposto mais tarde, apenas adicionou a fauna à uniformidade fitofisionômica e climática, características desta unidade biológica. Várias…

Species richness is a fundamental measurement of community and regional diversity, and it underlies many ecological models and conservation strategies. In spite of its importance, ecologists have not always appreciated the effects of abundance and…

Molecular phylogenetic studies have become a major area of interest in plant systematics, and their impacts on historical biogeographic hypotheses are not to be disregarded. In Brazil, most historical biogeographic studies have relied on animal…

Although the chloroplast genome contains many noncoding regions, relatively few have been exploited for interspecific phylogenetic and intraspecific phylogeographic studies. In our recent evaluation of the phylogenetic utility of 21 noncoding…

Chloroplast DNA sequences are a primary source of data for plant molecular systematic studies. A few key papers have provided the molecular systematics community with universal primer pairs for noncoding regions that have dominated the field, namely…

The availability of detailed environmental data, together with inexpensive and powerful computers, has fueled a rapid increase in predictive modeling of species environmental requirements and geographic distributions. For some species, detailed…

Climate change over the past approximately 30 years has produced numerous shifts in the distributions and abundances of species and has been implicated in one species-level extinction. Using projections of species' distributions for future climate…

Ecological surprises, substantial and unanticipated changes in the abundance of one or more species that result from previously unsuspected processes, are a common outcome of both experiments and observations in community and population ecology.…

Phylogenetic studies are revealing that major ecological niches are more conserved through evolutionary history than expected, implying that adaptations to major climate changes have not readily been accomplished in all lineages. Phylogenetic niche…

The relative importance of local ecological and larger-scale historical processes in causing differences in species richness across the globe remains keenly debated. To gain insight into these questions, we investigated the assembly of plant…

Com mais de 56.000 espécies de plantas (excluindo fungos), o Brasil tem uma das floras mais ricas do mundo quase 19% da flora mundial. Nosso conhecimento da diversidade e do status das plantas não vasculares no país é ainda muito incompleto, embora…

Explanations for biogeographic disjunctions involving South America and Africa typically invoke vicariance of western Gondwanan biotas or long distance dispersal. These hypotheses are problematical because many groups originated and diversified well…

We describe a model-based clustering method for using multilocus genotype data to infer population structure and assign individuals to populations. We assume a model in which there are K populations (where K may be unknown), each of which is…

How should ecologists and evolutionary biologists analyze nonnormal data that involve random effects? Nonnormal data such as counts or proportions often defy classical statistical procedures. Generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) provide a more…

Description Conservation Biology for All provides cutting-edge but basic conservation science to a global readership. A series of authoritative chapters have been written by the top names in conservation biology with the principal aim of…

Floral evolution has often been associated with differences in pollina- tion syndromes. Recently, this conceptual structure has been criticized on the grounds that flowers attract a broader spectrum of visitors than one might expect based on their…