Flora of China, Volume 22: Poaceae

Abstract

This book is a part of an ongoing project focusing on the flora of China, an international collaborative project involving many Chinese and non-Chinese taxonomists throughout the world, which is supported by various funding agencies (see http://flora.huh.harvard.edu/china/). The project is not a simple translation based on the Chinese-language Flora Republicae Popularis Sinicae (FRPS), but incorporates many combined morphology and modern molecular studies in order to reflect the most recent hypotheses about family and generic compositions. This large volume is devoted to one plant family only, the grasses (Poaceae or Gramineae), and no group of plants is of greater economic importance. It includes 28 tribes, 226 genera (seven endemic), and 1795 species (809 endemic) in China. The grasses are a relatively special group, and so special terminology is commonly used to describe them. At the front of the book, there is a section describing and illustrating the structures of these plants, thus facilitating identification and providing a glossary of terminology. I think this section is especially useful for students who know only a little about this group. In this book, each generic and scientific species name is followed by the Chinese name in Chinese and its corresponding translation in Hanyu Pinyin. Each genus contains a detailed morphological description, distribution area, the number of species that occur in China, of which endemic and introduced taxa are noted when necessary. After the generic description, there is a short discussion on the taxonomy, citing the recent revision. Then a dichotomous key is provided. Species treatment follows the same general order, adding cytological information, habitat data, and distributions within the provinces of China and abroad. In addition, some key characters for discriminating confusable species are provided. Poaceae is a very economically important group. After the description of a species, the authors generally give some comments on economic use. For example, ‘Phyllostachys heteroclada is widely cultivated for its high-quality culms, which are split for weaving articles such as the famous bamboo mats produced in Yiyang, Hunan’, and ‘Oryza rufipogon is a member of the AA genome complex, which includes cultivated rice, of which it is a progenitor. Members of this group hybridize quite easily and have contributed to the development of rice cultivars’, and so on. I believe such information will be valuable to some researchers who are interested in Chinese plant resources, especially within the grasses. This is the most comprehensive book about Chinese grasses to date, but the authors point out that their work is mainly based on a synthesis of many local floras, especially the Flora Yunnanica, Flora Sichuanica, Flora of Northeast China and similar volumes; thus the information from these particular places is more detailed. However, because some local floras are lacking, information about some taxa is not perfect. For example, the distribution of the monotypic genus Coleanthus in China is misunderstood: C. subtilis (Trattinnick) Siedel is common in north-east China, and with an isolated polpulation in Jiangxi. The plant of this species is small, and so perhaps a further investigation of the familial distribution is needed in the intermediate zone. Overall, this is a good volume and a useful addition to the bookshelf. It should be in the library of all institutes and colleges interested in the flora of China and adjacent regions, whether interested in floristics, phylogenetics or systematics.