This book provides a thoughtful and original reassessment of our understanding of plant speciation and extinction, by one of the leading workers on plant evolution. It is suitable for use in seminars mostly in departments of botany or plant sciences, and shoudl also be read by workers interested in speciation mechanisms and ecological succession at the community and landscape levels.

This book provides a thoughtful and original reassessment of our understanding of plant speciation and extinction, by one of the leading workers on plant evolution. It provides a new synthesis of evolutionary biology and ecology and examines species from their origins, then follows them through their expansion, differentiation and loss of cohesion, decline and extinction. The stages in the lives of species are viewed through ecological and genetic theory, and topics typically addressed independently are woven into a continuous fabric. As the first synthetic treatment of the stages through which plant species pass, this book is very useful for botanists, evolutionary biologists, conservation biologists, as well as all curious students of the biological sciences.