The investigation of biodiversity, particularly in the 'hotspots', begins with the identification of living objects the animals, fungi, and plants comprising the ecosystem. In the field conditions, it is important to reveal the attribution of the object to a taxon of higher level to one or another family (this identification is later checked in the lab and can be corrected). This book describes for the first time in details morphological characters of all modern angiosperm families both in a wide sense (419 families according to newest molecular data) and narrow sense (more than 900 infrafamilial 'morphological groups'). The book is illustrated with original photos, which show the principal morphological characters of the overwhelming majority of families of flowering plants which are important for their identification. This book will be interesting for taxonomists and phylogeneticists, evolutionary biologists, practicing nature conservationists, as well as for students specializing in various fields of plant sciences.
Alexey V. F. Ch. Bobrov is Professor of the Department of Biogeography, Geographical Faculty, M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU), Russia. He graduated MSU (1995) with a specialization in Botany & Zoology, obtained a PhD (1997) and DSci (2004) in Botany, and became the Professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2015. His areas of scientific interests include evolutionary morphology and anatomy of higher plants, phylogenetic systematics of seed plants, carpology, ecology and biology of pollination and plant dispersal, plant geography, palaeobotany. Alexey Bobrov is author and co-author of more than 200 scientific publications on plant morphology, anatomy, evolution and geography, including three monographs, and the organizer of more than 30 research and educational expeditions to the tropics and subtropics of the Old and New World.
