Fritz H. Schweingruber

Annett Börner

This unique and attractive open access textbook combines the beauty of macroscopic pictures of plant stems with the corresponding colorfully stained images of anatomical micro-structures. In contrast to most botanical textbooks, it presents all the stem characteristics as photographs and shows the microscopic reality. The amount of text is reduced to a minimum, and the scientific information is highlighted with short legends and labeled photographs, allowing readers to focus on the pictures to easily understand how the anatomical structures relate to genetic, ecological, decomposition and technical influences. It includes a chapter devoted to simple anatomical preparation techniques, and further chapters showing the cell content, cell walls, meristematic tissues and stem structures of all major taxonomic units and morphological growth forms in various ecological and climatic regions from subarctic to equatorial latitudes, as well as structures of fossil, subfossil and technically altered wood. This textbook appeals to students and researchers in the fields of plant anatomy, taxonomy, ecology, dendrochronology, history, plant pathology, and evolutionary biology as well as to technologists.

A Microscopic Aspect

The Plant Stem

The science of dendrochronology has grown significantly in the past 20 years. In the 1950s and 1960s, interest in the subject was limited to only a handful of scientists who perceived in dendrochronology a "l'art pour l'art". Today, however, specialists from many different fields recognize and are pursuing the problems of dendrochronology. Tree-ring research has acquired a permanent role in the various sciences of archeology, history, geology, ecology, and climatology. The founders of dendrochronology themselves were of varied scientific backgrounds and interests. For example, A. E. Douglass in the United States was an astronomer, B. Huber in Germany a forest-biologist, and F. N. Shvedov in Russia a climatologist. Today the spectrum is even broader. Many den drochronologists are authorities in mathematics, archeology, history, forestry, botany, wood technology, ecology geography, geology, etc. It is, therefore, understandable that it has become almost impossible for one individual to encompass the entire field. Bitvinskas (1974), Fritts (1976), Schweingruber (1983), and Mitsutani (1990) have attempted, each guided by his own interests, to provide at least an overview of the field. Recently, individual aspects have been presented by groups of authors in books edited by Fletscher (1978), Hughes et al. (1982), Jacoby and Hornbeck (1987) and Bradley and Jones (1992). It is very likely that in the future summaries covering each branch of dendrochronology will be published.

Fritz H. Schweingruber

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