Flora of the United States

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The flora of the United States comprises about 16,000 species. The United States possess one of the most diverse temperate floras in the world, comparable only to that of China. Moreover, subtropical and tropical flora covers Hawaii and the southernmost part of Florida. The nature of the United States provided the world with a large number of cultural plants, mostly ornamentals, such as black locust, bald cypress and Southern magnolia, now cultivated in temperate regions all over the world. Some of the plants, such as Franklinia alatamaha, have already become extinct in the wild.

According to Armen Takhtajan, Robert F. Thorne and other geobotanists, the territory of the United States (including Hawaii and Alaska) is divided between three floristic kingdoms, six floristic regions and twelve floristic provinces, characterized by a certain degree of endemism:

Holarctic Kingdom

Circumboreal Region

Arctic Province

Canadian Province

North American Atlantic Region

Appalachian Province

Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plain Province

North American Prairies Province

Rocky Mountain Region

Vancouverian Province

Rocky Mountain Province

Madrean Region

Great Basin Province

Californian Province

Sonoran Province

Neotropical Kingdom

Caribbean Region

West Indian Province

Paleotropic Kingdom

Hawaiian Region

Hawaiian Province

[edit] Prominent botanists who described the flora

• Asa Gray (1810-1888)
• John Merle Coulter (1851-1928)
• Charles Piper (1867-1926)
• Merritt Lyndon Fernald (1873-1950)
• G. Ledyard Stebbins (1906-2000)
• William Alfred Weber (b. 1918)
• Arthur Cronquist (1919-1992)

[edit] Further reading

• Flora of North America North of Mexico. 12+ vols. New York and Oxford, 1993+.
• The PLANTS Database @ United States Department of Agriculture

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v • d • e Flora of North America Sovereign states Antigua and Barbuda · Bahamas · Barbados · Belize · Canada · Costa Rica · Cuba · Dominica · Dominican Republic · El Salvador · Grenada · Guatemala · Haiti · Honduras · Jamaica · Mexico · Nicaragua · Panama1 · Saint Kitts and Nevis · Saint Lucia · St. Vincent and the Grenadines · Trinidad and Tobago1 · United States Dependencies and other territories American Samoa2 · Anguilla · Aruba1 · Bermuda · British Virgin Islands · Cayman Islands · Greenland · Guadeloupe · Guam2 · Martinique · Montserrat · Navassa Island · Netherlands Antilles · Northern Mariana Islands2 · Puerto Rico · St. Barthélemy · St. Martin · St. Pierre and Miquelon · Turks and Caicos Islands · United States Virgin Islands 1 Territories also in or commonly reckoned elsewhere in the Americas (South America). 2 Territories also in or commonly reckoned to be in the Pacific basin.