Anatomy, Age and Ecology of High Mountain Plants in Ladakh, the Western Himalaya

Anatomy, Age and Ecology of High Mountain Plants in Ladakh, the Western Himalaya the booklance

by Jiří Doležal (Author), Miroslav Dvorský (Author), Annett Börner (Author), Jan Wild (Author), Fritz Hans Schweingruber (Author)

This aesthetically unique book combines ecological, morphological and anatomical, as well as phylogenetic studies on plant material in a largely unexplored dry mountain region above the
timberline. It offers the first comparative analysis of hundreds of plants – annuals, perennial herbs and dwarf shrubs – in an area of 87,000 km2 at altitudes from 2600 to 6150 m above sea
level in the Western Himalaya. Characteristic landscape pictures of all major vegetation types and maps show at which locations and altitudes the individual species of vascular plants are
distributed, while macroscopic plant pictures and plant age are related to high-quality micro-sections and micro-photographs.

The anatomical features of 345 dicotyledons were characterized using the published coding systems and those of 155 monocotyledones were characterized on the basis of a newly developed key.
The number of annual rings and anatomical features of the xylem and phloem of dicots are compared and related to different ecological conditions within this extremely dry and cold
environment. The ecological and anatomical characterization is used to create a phylogenetic tree based on nucleotide sequences, and indicates which features are genetically stable and which
ones are modified by environmental factors.