W. John Kress
W. John Kress
Walter John Emil Kress is an American botanist and the vice-president for science at the National Museum of Natural History. He currently holds the appointment (2010) as the Director of the Consortium for Understanding and Sustaining a Biodiverse Planet at the Smithsonian Institution and is the former Executive Director of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation.
"The majority of species, , and of s are found in the of the Earth. Therefore it is no surprise that the greatest diversity of flower morphologies and plant-pollinator interactions are also present in the tropics. Endress has amassed a splendid display of examples and illustrations of this tremendous diversity. ... ... There are many references to the classic works of , , and , as well as many lesser known but important European workers of the nineteenth century."
"A major task for any , , , , or applied forensic specialist is to determine the correct identification of a plant sample in a rapid, repeatable, and reliable fashion. “s,” i.e., standardized short sequences of between 400 and 800 s long that in theory can be easily isolated and characterized for all species of plant on the planet, were originally conceived to facilitate this task (Hebert et al., 2003). By combining the strengths of , , and , DNA barcodes offer a quick and accurate means to recognize previously known, described, and named species and to retrieving information about them. This tool also has the potential to speed the discovery of the thousands of plant species yet to be named, especially in s (Cowan et al., 2006)."
"are reported for all but two major divisions of extant s ... No epiphytes have been reported in the or the . Ten percent of all species (23,466 species) are epiphytic. ... The s account for the great majority of epiphytic taxa at all hierarchical levels. ... The s are depauperate in epiphytes: only 0.5% of the species are epiphytes."
"s are native primarily in the American tropics from the in Central Mexico to the in , including the . A curious disjunct group of six species of Heliconia separated by thousands of miles from most other species is found in the Old World tropics (Kress, 1985, 1990a). The center of diversity of the genus is found along the northern Andes (Colombia and Ecuador) extending into southern Central America (Panama and Costa Rica; Andersson, 1989). Most species inhabit moist or wet regions, but some are found in seasonally dry areas. Although heliconias attain their most luxuriant vegetative growth in the humid lowland tropics at elevations below 500 meters, the greatest numbers of species (many locally endemic) are found in middle-elevation (800-1,500 meters) rain and cloud forest habitats. Few species occur above 2000 meters."
