Plant Systematics: Beginnings and Endings

Plant Systematics: Beginnings and Endings

Endings and Beginnings

533 " [Everything] has to come to an end, sometime. " L. Frank Baum The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) 1 As our regular readers know, this is a very special issue of College & Research Libraries. It is the last one that we will print. Beginning with the first issue of volume 75 (January 2014), this journal will join many others in being published solely in digital form. The road to this decision h...

Endings and beginnings

At the start of a new year it is time to look back over the past 12 months, as well as to look forward. 2015 has been one with a sad farewell to two very good friends, Dr Howard Jones Jr (see Fact Views Vis Obgyn, 2015, 7:149-152) and Professor Jan van der Merwe whose obituary appears in this issue. The past year has seen some very interesting and stimulating papers, not to forget about the mos...

Editorial: of zombies, endings and beginnings...

In the Globe and Mail, 6 September 2008, Doug Saunders’s column was entitled, ‘‘Europe Comes Home to the Shock of a Demographic Bombshell.’’ He opines on the latest Eurostat report, Population and Social Conditions, which predicts that by 2015 the European population will begin to shrink as deaths outnumber births, even taking into account immigration and in the absence of any other changes. Ne...

Genomics, bioinformatics, and plant systematics

Genomics and bioinformatics are emerging disciplines that have the potential to fundamentally alter current approaches to molecular systematics. The sequencing of eukaryotic genomes has demonstrated the ability to obtain and interpret nucleotide sequences at a scale and efficiency that was unimaginable just a few years ago. The immense amount of sequence information generated by genome projects...