If you have any questions/comments about this course, send them to Professor Annie Schmitt, Johanna_Schmitt@brown.edu or Teaching Assistants. You can also post your questions/comments to Online discussion group.

Course overview

This course has four objectives. The first is simply to teach you how to look at plants and identify them. You will learn observational skills, the language of plant description, and the diag-nostic technique of eliminating alternative possibilities to arrive at a correct identification. Second, you will learn the characteristics of major seed plant families, and the currently hypothesized phylogenetic relationships of those families. By the end of the course you should be able to recognize a number of major families on sight and have some idea of their evolutionary relationships and the systematic principles used to elucidate those relationships. This knowledge will dramatically simplify the process of classifying and identifying any flowering plant you encounter, anywhere in the world. A third goal is to give you an idea of some of the major trends of evolution and adaptive radiation in the seed plants, and to explore some of the ecological mechanisms and selective pressures underlying those trends. (This knowledge should give you some appreciation of the nature of the plant biodiversity that is currently being lost. It has been conservatively estimated that 12.5% of the world’s plant species are threatened globally, and 29% of species native to the U.S. are at risk.) Finally, we will briefly cover a number of plants important to civilization and the evolutionary basis for the traits that "preadapted" them for human use.

Lectures will rely heavily on slides. After some introductory terminology and orienta-tion, we will go through the major seed plant families, stressing ecological and evolutionary themes as well as important traits for identification and classification. Interspersed with the family descriptions will be coverage of major evolutionary trends and mechanisms (e.g., pollination, plant-herbivore interactions, breeding sys-tems, etc.). Within each family we will touch on the species of economic (or other) importance to humans. Labs will stress observational and diagnostic skills important to plant identification and give you hands-on experience with some of the plants you will hear about in lecture. There will also be 6 field trips to give you a chance to practice your skills in the field and get a look at various New England plant communities.