Readers of Kalmiopsis were recently treated to a synopsis of taxonomic changes affecting flowering plants in Oregon (Chambers, 1992). The present article has been written to update readers on nomenclatural changes recently proposed for the seedless vascular plants, which include not only ferns, but also horsetails, club-mosses, and their relatives. Together these groups are often referred to as...

Cyrtomium falcatum is a popular ornamental fern cultivated worldwide. Native to the Korean Peninsula, Japan, and Dokdo Island in the Sea of Japan, it is the only fern present on Dokdo Island. We isolated and characterized the chloroplast (cp) genome of C. falcatum, and compared it with those of closely related species. The genes trnV-GAC and trnV-GAU were found to be present within the cp genom...

This hydroponic experiment was conducted to determine the effects of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) levels and frond-harvesting on the effectiveness of arsenic (As)hyperaccumulator Chinese brake fern (Pteris vittata L.) to remove As from contaminated groundwater collected from south Florida. Three-month old ferns were grown in 38-L plastic tanks (two ferns per tank) containing 30-L of As-conta...

Sustainable agriculture demands reduced input of man-made nitrogen (N) fertilizer, yet N2 fixation limits the productivity of crops with heterotrophic diazotrophic bacterial symbionts. We investigated floating ferns from the genus Azolla that host phototrophic diazotrophic Nostoc azollae in leaf pockets and belong to the fastest growing plants. Experimental production reported here demonstrated...

In this paper, we first apply random ferns for classification of real music recordings of a jazz band. No initial segmentation of audio data is assumed, i.e., no onset, offset, nor pitch data are needed. The notion of random ferns is described in the paper, to familiarize the reader with this classification algorithm, which was introduced quite recently and applied so far in image recognition t...

The ferns comprise one of the most ancient tracheophytic plant lineages, and occupy habitats ranging from tundra to deserts and the equatorial tropics. Like their nearest relatives the conifers, modern ferns possess tracheid-based xylem but the structure-function relationships of fern xylem are poorly understood. Here, we sampled the fronds (megaphylls) of 16 species across the fern phylogeny, ...

We have studied macerated xylem of ferns, supplemented by sections, by means of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) in a series of 20 papers, the results of which are summarized and interpreted here. Studies were based mostly on macerations, but also on some sections; these methods should be supplemented by other methods to confirm or modify the findings presented. Guidelines are cited for our i...

-We present the first cladistic analysis of extant ferns based on morphological characters. Our data set consisted of 77 vegetative and reproductive morphological/anatomical characters recorded on a broad sampling of 50 extant pteridophyte taxa, with representatives of all major fern groups, and one seed plant (Cycas). An annotated list of both retained and excluded morphological characters is ...

Ferns are well known for their shade-dwelling habits. Their ability to thrive under low-light conditions has been linked to the evolution of a novel chimeric photoreceptor--neochrome--that fuses red-sensing phytochrome and blue-sensing phototropin modules into a single gene, thereby optimizing phototropic responses. Despite being implicated in facilitating the diversification of modern ferns, t...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY Hawaii is home to 238 native and 35 alien fern and lycophyte taxa distributed across steep gradients in elevation and resource availability. The fern flora spans a wide range of growth forms, with extraordinary diversity in morphology and plant size. Yet the potential factors underlying this diversity have remained enigmatic. METHODS We used a trait database generated fro...