Division 6: Europe

Abstract

Flora URSS is thus completed. We remember all our colleagues, many of them long dead, who contributed to its achievement. We have done what we could. We welcome the young botanists and wish them success. Fecimus quod potuimus. Vivant sequentes . E. G. Bobrov, Nature 205 : 1049 (1965). It is the hope of the editors [of Flora Europaea ] that by wrestling with these problems they have, at least to some extent, made it unnecessary for the next generation to do so again, and have thus enabled them to devote more time to plants. D. A. Webb, Taxon 27 : 14 (1978). The geographical limits of Europe adopted here are essentially the same as those adopted for Flora Europaea , with the omission of the Azores, the Arctic islands and the tundra zone (respectively included in Regions 02, 05 and 06). The Caucasus, sometimes considered to be part of Europe, is treated as Region 74 within Division 7 (northern, central and southwestern Asia). Outside of the eight groups of polities here delimited, separate units have been allocated for a number of major physiographic entities such as the Mediterranean, the Alps and Carpathians, and the Ural. Organized floristic study and the writing of floras as they are today internationally known began in Renaissance Europe, but had antecedents in ancient Greece and in China and Japan. Significant advances in methodology came through the work of such scholars as Charles de l'Ecluse (Clusius), Johann and Caspar Bauhin, John Ray, Albrecht von Haller, Carl Linnaeus, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle, William J. and Joseph D. Hooker, Karl Philip von Martius, George Bentham, Nathaniel L. Britton and Gustav Hegi and, in the modern era, the Flora SSSR work-group, the Flora Europaea Organisation, the Flora of Australia project, and the original, abortive Flora North America Program.