Anatomic Atlas of Aquatic and Wetland Plant Stems

In February 2020, the Anatomic Atlas of Aquatic and Wetland Plant Stems went out under Springer Publ. after almost seven years of preparation as a result of cooperation between IB researchers Andrea Kučerová, Lubomír Adamec and Jiří Doležal with a Swiss professor Fritz H. Schweingruber.

During one of his research visits to the Institute of Botany at Třeboň, Czech Rep., Profesor F.H. Schweingruber took a look at the fully flowering Collection of aquatic and wetland plants, which contained most of the diversity of Central European wetlands. His infectious fascination by the plant world led to his idea of the preparation of an anatomical stem atlas from the plant material available in this Collection and in his own material. The book includes a hydrobotanical and an anatomical section. The hydrobotanical section describes the ecological classification of aquatic and wetland plants and explains major ecophysiological processes e.g., photosynthesis, mineral nutrition, gas exchange, adaptations to soil anoxia, turion formation and ecology. The anatomical section presents light microscopic anatomical images of aquatic and wetland plant stems. It features double-stained cross- and longitudinal sections of almost 400 species of vascular plants from the lowland to the alpine zone in Central Europe, including plants from lakes, ponds, rivers, bogs, fens, wet meadows, saline meadows, tall herb associations and alpine snow beds. The microscopic photographs at various magnifications are supplemented with detailed anatomical descriptions. For each species, it provides a photo of the whole plant, a short morphological and ecological description as well as indications about its world and Central European distribution. The last part of the book contains a detail statistical analysis of the anatomical characteristics according to the species ecology (i.e, functional groups) and phylogenetics; phylogenetical trees for the important anatomical characteristics are presented separately for monocots and dicots.

 

Schweingruber F. H., Kučerová A., Adamec L. & Doležal J. 2020: Anatomic Atlas of Aquatic and Wetland Plant Stems. Springer Nature Switzerland AG, Cham, Switzerland, 1-487.