XVI International Botanical Congess

The green plants provide food, shelter, and medicines, their morphological, chemical, and ecological diversity is paramount among life's lineages. The reconstruction of phylogenetic relationships of green plants is thus important both for practical concerns and for understanding of major evolutionary events such as the origin of multicellularity, diversification of life-history strategies, and the conquest of land. Phylogenetic understanding of green plants has rapidly increased due to new methods of data gathering and data analysis, as well as an increased coordination of effort among different laboratories (see the Green Plant Phylogeny Research Coordination Group web page at: http://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/bryolab/greenplantpage.html). Coordinated, combined analyses of molecular and morphological data offer the greatest future potential.