From Plant Press, Vol. 19, No. 2, April 2016.
The grasses, with about 12,074 species worldwide, have played an important role in the daily life and economy of Egypt for more than 12,000 years. As part of the Fertile Crescent, Egypt lies within the cradle of civilization and the birthplace of agriculture. The cultivation of cereals for making bread and the use of grasses for making baskets, mats, arrows, and building materials has been handed down through humans for centuries. The systematic study of grasses in this region is particularly important since grasses are among the most difficult plants to identify; they often are highly polymorphic and have a generally streamlined morphology.
In “Grass of Egypt,” a new publication in Smithsonian Contributions to Botany (103: 1−201; 2016), Kamal M. Ibrahim, Hasnaa A. Hosni, and Paul M. Peterson provide a vegetative key, glossary of terms, descriptions, index of common names (English and Arabic), and illustrations for 284 native and naturalized grasses that are known to occur in Egypt. In addition, a synopsis of the classification for all grass genera that occur in Egypt is provided and the authors have included a phytogeographical map dividing Egypt into 17 regions in which each grass species has been attributed to one or more regions.
Keys using floral characteristics are the most accurate way to identify grasses, but mature plants or portions of those plants without complete spikelets are often the only available fragment. Under such conditions conventional botanical manuals offer little assistance. Moreover, identification using floral characteristics requires special training in grass taxonomy that is not available to interested amateurs and field ecologists. Hence the need for alternative ways to make determinations. The authors, along with Konstantin Romaschenko and Robert J. Soreng, have recently initiated a DNA barcode survey of Egyptian grasses and currently have nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer sequences for 93 species (33 percent) and plastid rpl32-trinL sequences for 123 species (43 percent). They hope to gather the missing DNA sequences in the future allowing Egypt to be the first country with a complete set of barcode data to easily identify the grasses.
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