Although they are among the most abundant of all living things and provide essential oxygen,food, and shelter to the animal kingdom, few books pay any attention to how and why plantsevolved the wondrous diversity we see today. In this richly illustrated and clearly written book,Karl J. Niklas provides the first comprehensive synthesis of modern evolutionary biology as itrelates to plants.After presenting key evolutionary principles, Niklas recounts the saga of plant life from itsorigins to the radiation of the flowering plants. To investigate how living plants might haveevolved, Niklas conducts a series of computer-generated "walks" on fitness "landscapes,"arriving at hypothetical forms of plant life strikingly similar to those of today and the distantpast. He concludes with an extended consideration of molecular biology and paleontology.An excellent overview for undergraduates, this book will also challenge graduate students andresearchers.

Allometry, the study of the growth rate of an organism's parts in relation to the whole, has produced exciting results in research on animals. Now distinguished plant biologist Karl J. Niklas has written the first book to apply allometry to studies of the evolution, morphology, physiology, and reproduction of plants.Niklas covers a broad spectrum of plant life, from unicellular algae to towering trees, including fossil as well as extant taxa. He examines the relation between organic size and variations in plant form, metabolism, reproduction, and evolution, and draws on the zoological literature to develop allometric techniques for the peculiar problems of plant height, the relation between body mass and body length, and size-correlated variations in rates of growth. For readers unfamiliar with the basics of allometry, an appendix explains basic statistical methods.For botanists interested in an original, quantitative approach to plant evolution and function, and for zoologists who want to learn more about the value of allometric techniques for studying evolution, Plant Allometry makes a major contribution to the study of plant life. (view table of contents)

Product Description: In this first comprehensive treatment of plant biomechanics, Karl J. Niklas analyzes plant form and provides a far deeper understanding of how form is a response to basic physical laws. He examines the ways in which these laws constrain the organic expression of form, size, and growth in a variety of plant structures, and in plants as whole organisms, and he draws on the fossil record as well as on studies of extant species to present a genuinely evolutionary view of the response of plants to abiotic as well as biotic constraints...read more