Top Five Plant Classes


Photo Courtesy of the University of Hawaii at Manoa

The five plant classes with the largest counts include:

Poaceae - Includes herbs, shrubs, and trees. Leaves alternate or basal, simple, entire, with overlapping sheath margins.

Asteraceae - Shrubs or trees. Leaves are opposite, simple and palmate veined or palmate or pinnate compound.

Cyperaceae - Herbs and sedges. Annual, biennial, or perennial. Leaves alternate and are distichous, or tistichous. Linear to obovate, parallel veined, cross venlate.

Fabaceae - Herbs, shrubs, woody vines or trees. Leaves alternate, most commonly are pinnate or bipinnate. Flowers perfect, regular to very irregular. Fruit is a legaume, loment or indehiscent pod.

Scrophulariaceae - Leaves are opposite or whorled, simple to deeply divided or compound. Inflorescence is various cymose or racemose, sometimes spicate or paniculate. Flowers perfect, irregular. Fruit is a capsule.

References

University of Hawaii at Manoa

Texas A&M University Bioinformatics Working Group

Common Plant Orders in the Big Thicket
Big Thicket Common Plant Orders
Map courtesy of S. Glenn of HARC

The map above displays the locations within the Big Thicket where many of the most common orders of plants have been reported.

Top Five Plant Orders


Photo courtesy of San Francisco State University

The five orders with the largest counts include:

Cyperales - The sedge order. Grass-like, often perennial tufted herbs. Small flowers on grass-like plants on triangular or solid stems. The fruit has a single seed.

Asterales - Flowers are connected by their margins and form a tubular corolla. Other parts attach to the top of the ovary rather than beneath it.

Fabales - An order of dicotyledonous flowering plants. The characteristic fruit is a pod consisting of ovary that is a tightly folded leaf which splits into tow halves when mature.

Scrophulariales - Net-veined leaves with six divisions. Seed plants that produce an embryo with paired cotyledon.

Liliales - Herbs or vines. Grow from bulbs which store food. They have broad leaves with veins associated with dicots. Vines produce flowers in spherical clusters called umbels.

Resources:

Texas A&M University Bioinformatics

University of California Museum of Paleontology

 
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