R.Br. ex Bercht. & J.Presl
Alismatales is an order of flowering plants including about 4500 species. Plants assigned to this order are mostly tropical or aquatic.
Alismatales comprise herbaceous flowering plants of aquatic and marshy habitats, and the only monocots known to have green embryos other than the Amaryllidaceae. They also include the only marine angiosperms. The flowers are usually arranged in inflorescences, and the mature seeds lack endosperm.
Both marine and freshwater forms include those with staminate flowers that detach from the parent plant and float to the surface where they become pollinated. In others, pollination occurs underwater where pollen may form elongated strands, increasing chance of success. Most aquatic species have a totally submerged juvenile phase, and flowers are either floating or emergent. Vegetation may be totally submersed, have floating leaves, or protrude from the water. Collectively they are commonly known as "water plantain".
As understood, the order contains about 165 genera in 13 families, with a cosmopolitan distribution.
The Angiosperm Phylogeny Group system (APG) of 1998 and APG II (2003) assigned the Alismatales to the monocots, which may be thought of as an unranked clade containing the families listed below. The biggest departure from earlier systems (see below) is the inclusion of family Araceae. By its inclusion the order has grown enormously in number of species. The family Araceae alone accounts for about a hundred genera, totaling over two thousand species. The rest of the families together contain only about five hundred species.
- order Alismatales APG-III
The APG III system (2009) differs only in that the Limnocharitaceae are combined with the Alismataceae; it was also suggested that the genus Maundia (of the Juncaginaceae) could be separated into a monogeneric family, Maundiaceae, but the authors noted that more study was necessary before Maundiaceae could be recognized.
Cronquist's subclass Alismatidae conformed fairly closely to the order Alismatales as defined by APG, minus the Araceae.
In Tahktajan's classification (1997), the Order Alismatales contains only the Alismataceae and Limnocharitaceae making it equivalent to the Alismataceae as revised in APG-III. Other families included in the Alismatates as currently defined are here distributed among ten additional orders, all of which are assigned, with the following exception, to the Subclass Alismatidae. Araceae in Tahktajan 1997 is assigned to the Arales and placed in the Subclass Aridae; Tofieldiaceae to the Melanthiales and placed in the Liliidae.
- Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (2009), "An update of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group classification for the orders and families of flowering plants: APG III", Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society 161 (2): 105–121, doi:10.1111/j.1095-8339.2009.00996.x, retrieved 10 December 2010
- -Angiosperm Phylogeny Website
- -Alismatales (Water Plantains)
- -Flowering Plant Gateway
- B. C. J. du Mortier 1829. Analyse des Familles de Plantes : avec l'indication des principaux genres qui s'y rattachent. Imprimerie de J. Casterman, Tournay
- W. S. Judd, C. S. Campbell, E. A. Kellogg, P. F. Stevens, M. J. Donoghue, 2002. Plant Systematics: A Phylogenetic Approach, 2nd edition. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, Massachusetts ISBN 0-87893-403-0.
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