Overview
Arecales is an of flowering plants. The order has been widely recognised only for the past few decades; until then, the accepted name for the order including these plants was Principes.
The APG II system of 2003 recognises the order and places it in the clade commelinids in the monocots and uses this circumscription:
- order Arecales
This is unchanged from the APG system of 1998, although it used the spelling "commelinoids" instead of commelinids.
The Cronquist system of 1981 made the same choices at the rank of family and order, but assigned the order to the subclass Arecidae in the class Liliopsida (= monocotyledons).
The Thorne system (1992) and the Dahlgren system had made the same choices at the rank of family and order, but assigned the order to the superorder Arecanae in the subclass Liliidae (= monocotyledons).
Photos
Taxonomy
The Order Arecales is further organized into finer groupings including:
- Family (2): Arecaceae · Palmae
- Species: ZipcodeZoo has pages for 6,141 species, subspecies, varieties, forms, and cultivars in the Order Arecales.
Families
Arecaceae
Trees or shrubs [lianas], perennial, branched or unbranched, solitary or clustered. Roots adventitious, thick. Stems woody, subterranean or terrestrial, creeping or erect [climbing], slender or massive, sometimes conspicuously enlarged and storing starch and water, smooth or covered with fibrous or prickly remains of leaf bases. Leaves spirally arranged; sheaths tubular, often forming crownshaft, sometimes with ligular appendages; petioles terete, channeled, or ridged, unarmed or bearing prickles or marginal teeth; hastula (flap of tissue from petiole apex at junction with surface of blade) absent or present adaxially, rarely present abaxially. Leaf blade palmate, costapalmate (intermediate between palmate and pinnate), pinnate, or 2-pinnate [undivided]; plication (folding lengthwise into pleats or furrows) ^ - or tent-shaped (reduplicate, splitting along abaxial ridges) or V-shaped (induplicate, splitting along adaxial ridges) ; segments lanceolate, linear, or cuneate [rhombic], glabrous or variously scaly, unarmed or bearing prickles (proximal segments modified into spines in Phoenix) . Inflorescences from solitary [clustered] axillary buds, borne within, below, or above crown of leaves, paniculate, rarely spicate, usually branched to 1--5 orders; prophyll (1st bract on main inflorescence axis) 2-keeled; peduncular bract(s) (empty bract[s] between 1st prophyll and 1st bract subtending branch) present [absent]; flowers bisexual, unisexual with staminate and pistillate on same plants or on different plants, or both bisexual and unisexual on same plant. Flowers solitary or variously clustered along rachillae of inflorescence, radially symmetric; perianth 1--2-seriate; sepals [2--]3[--4], distinct or connate; petals [2--]3[--4], distinct or variously connate; androecium: stamens [3--]6--34[--1000]; filaments distinct or connate or basally adnate to petals; anthers basifixed or dorsifixed, dehiscing latrorsely or introrsely; staminodes in pistillate flowers distinct or variously connate or adnate to pistil or petals; pistils 1 or 3, distinct or partially connate, each bearing 1 ovule and 1 stigma, or 1 pistil bearing 1--3 ovules and 3 stigmas; styles distinct or connate, short; stigmas dry; pistillode in staminate flower present or absent. Fruits drupaceous or berrylike; stigmatic remains basal or apical; exocarp smooth, warty, prickly, or hirsute [corky or scaly]; mesocarp fleshy or dry and fibrous; endocarp papery, leathery, or bony, sometimes with 3 germination pores. Seeds 1(--2+), free or adhering to endocarp; seed coat thin; endosperm homogeneous or ruminate, sometimes penetrated by seed coat; embryo basal, lateral, or apical, peglike, minute; eophyll (1st seedling leaf with blade) undivided and lanceolate or 2-cleft [pinnate].[1] [more]
Palmae
At least 31 species and subspecies belong to the Family Palmae.
More info about the Family Palmae may be found here.
Bibliography
- Dransfield, J. and N. W. Uhl. 1986. An outline of a classification of palms. Principes 30: 3--11.
- Henderson, A. 1986. A review of pollination studies in the Palmae. Bot. Rev. 52: 221--259.
- Henderson, A., G. Galeano, and R. G. Bernal. 1995. Field Guide to the Palms of the Americas. Princeton.
- McClintock, E. 1993. Arecaceae [Palmae]. In: J. C. Hickman, ed. 1993. The Jepson Manual. Higher Plants of California. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London. P. 1105.
- Moore, H. E. Jr. 1973. The major groups of palms and their distribution. Gentes Herb. 11: 27--141.
- Tomlinson, P. B. 1990. The Structural Biology of Palms. Oxford.
- Uhl, N. W. and J. Dransfield. 1987. Genera Palmarum. Lawrence, Kans.
- Zona, S. 1997. The genera of Palmae (Arecaceae) in the southeastern United States. Harvard Pap. Bot. 2: 71--107.
Footnotes
- Scott Zona "Arecaceae". in Flora of North America Vol. 22 Page 95. Oxford University Press. Online at EFloras.org.
Sources
- The distribution map on the Distribution tab comes from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and is used with permission.
- Photographs on this page are copyrighted by individual photographers, and individual copyrights apply.
- The GMapImageCutter is used under license from the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis.
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