Discovering the plant world
Discovering the plant world
复制标题
探索植物世界
作者：
G. Prance
过去五十年是植物采集加速的时期，尤其是在热带地区。然而，这是一场与时间的赛跑，因为自然栖息地的破坏也急剧增加。收集仍在增加开花植物新物种的速度表明库存尚未接近完成，并且过去估计的总物种数较低，应增加至 320,000 个。热带小区域的花卉生产和定量库存，加上密集的实地工作，极大地帮助了库存水平的提高。未来的收集应仔细针对特别受到威胁的地区，例如那些被定义为热点的地区，并收集稀有物种，而不是重复过度收集广泛分布的常见类群。未来的收集还应该为分子工作和进化发展等辅助研究收集材料。
The last fifty years have been a time of accelerated plant collection, especially in the tropics. However, this is a race against time since the destruction of natural habitats has also increased dramatically. The rate at which collecting is still adding new species of flowering plants indicates that the inventory is not nearly complete, and that the past estimates of total species numbers are low and should be increased to 320,000. The production of florulas and quantitative inventories of small areas of the tropics, accompanied by intensive fieldwork, has greatly helped to improve the level of inventory. Future collecting should be carefully targeted towards areas that are particularly threatened, such as those defined as hotspots, and also collection of rare species rather than repeated over-collection of widely distributed common taxa. Future collecting should also gather material for ancillary studies such as molecular work and evolutionary development.