CONIFERS AROUND THE WORLD

Descrizione

Conifers Around the World presents 541 taxa of conifers of 56 genera, including several that are new to science. This book is the outcome of an ambitious 30-year project to search out and document all the conifers in the world's temperate zones and their adjacent regions--if possible in their most pristine natural habitats. The authors spent almost 2000 days in the field on the trail of conifers. They were able to visit and document the world's most inaccessible conifer taxa and to include the accompanying flora and vegetation in their documentation. They compiled a collection of 340,000 photographs representing thousands of taxa and backed with precise documentation. The two volumes contain: - An in-depth, richly illustrated 86-page introduction to conifers and the regions to which they are native. - Species plates, arranged geographically into 11 regions, each containing three to five detail photos that highlight the species' most characteristic features and one image showing the tree(s) growing in the wild. A brief text accompanying each plate provides essential descriptive and historical information. (The Appendix in Volume 2 contains images and very short descriptions of 28 additional conifer taxa.) - 175 habitat photographs showing the most picturesque conifer habitats on five continents. - A unique Bark Gallery containing 646 color photographs taken in the wild. - a 44-page chapter on the 7 conifer families and 56 genera discussed in the book, containing over 1200 detail drawings including a 6-page graphic essay of the pollen cones of each genus. - 474 distribution maps that provide a visual image of the natural range of each species discussed. Conifers Around the World will appeal to a wide variety of readers, from scholars to armchair travelers. The book's unique organization presents the species by region, offering a realistic picture of their worldwide distribution. Starting in Europe, the reader is invited to follow the conifers through Asia Minor and North Africa to China and Japan, then to the Americas (explored from west to east and then south), and finally to Tasmania and New Zealand. By presenting, for example, all the Southeast Asian conifers consecutively on 150 pages, their whole ecological range is brought together as never before. One can, as it were, audition a region's trees in the wild, and see how great age and the forces of nature can vary the appearance of even well known species.
Pagg. 1089, rilegato