This book represents the most comprehensive compilation of data on threatened vascular plants ever published. It includes the names of some 33,000 plant species determined to be rare or threatened on a global scale. Conservation assessments were provided by the IUCN Species Survival Commission, the National Botanical Institute (South Africa), Environment Australia, and CSIRO, The Nature Conservancy, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, together with hundreds of botanic gardens and botanists throughout the world. The Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh and the New York Botanical Garden have made major in-kind contributions.The result of 20 years work by botanists and conservationists around the world, it is intended as a conservation tool, a provider of baseline information to measure conservation progress and as a primary source of data on plant species. Most importantly, however, it provides the building blocks on which to base a worldwide effort to conserve plant species.

Seeds are a vital part of life on earth. They are fundamental for plant reproduction, and many seeds play an important role in the diet of man and domestic and wild animals. Knowledge of the appearance of seeds - seed morphology - is of great importance to botany and seed identification in relation to: seed setting, quarantine work, forensic work, seed poisening, studies of seed dispersal, seed banks and archaeological studies.;This bibliography contains 3775 references and is divided in two parts: handbooks, and articles and monographs. In the latter the bibliographical reference is supplemented by information of importance to seed identificaiton: genera mentioned in articles, keys, descriptions, drawings, photograph, scanning electron micrographs, anatomy and chemical methods. The index of authors contains the names of an extensive number of authors, cited in the bibliography, and in the index of genera more than 3900 genera, described in one or more of the publications are cited.