Format: ORAL

Mark W. Chase

Department of Environment and Agriculture, Curtin University, Bentley, WA 6102, Australia Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond, TW9 3DS, United Kingdom

In the middle to late 1990s, as DNA data began to accumulate, it became clear that no modern angiosperm classification resembled the emerging DNA results. In Uppsala, Sweden, Kre and Birgitta Bremer and their colleagues created a booklet with a new classification based on the DNA results with the idea that it could be used in teaching plant systematics. At that time, several of their PhD students were collecting molecular data in the molecular systematics laboratory at Kew, and on a supervisory visit to Uppsala in 1998 I was shown this teaching booklet. We decided that their largely DNA-based classification should be published. At the time, although molecular systematists were identifying the same clades of families, different order names, formal and informal, were being applied to these, which made communication difficult and was undesirable. We contacted other botanists who were also working broadly on angiosperm phylogenetics, both with DNA and morphological data, to get their input and decided that a new system should be published under the APG acronym, to avoid the situation in which the new classification was authored by one authority. Although the APG classification has gone through some minor changes in philosophy and four updates, with a fifth in progress, the general framework remains unchanged.