Best wishes for a good academic year. The information listed below is intended to guide students in their course selection. Please be sure to attend the first lecture to be aware of the requirements and expectations of the course. You must collect and correctly identify 15 specimens. Lab material is covered on lecture exams.
Quizzes require recognition of plant morphology and families, and keying out plants.
Lecture exams are multiple choice and fill in the blank, and cover lab and lecture material. Lecture topics include primitive flowers, floral evolution, vegetative morphology, mating systems, pollination syndromes, nomenclature, variation and evolution, chromosomes, hybridization and polyploidy, chemotaxonomy, types of classifications, cladistics, and phylogeny. In addition, there are lectures on the specialized families of orchids, grasses and composites. The lab covers conifers and 24 common flowering plant families. The objective of the laboratory is to learn how to recognize the common families of flowering plants and conifers, and how to identify seed plants.