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Mihai Costea
Digital Atlas of Cuscuta (Convolvulaceae) launched
Sep 13/07
After 2 years of work, the Digital Atlas of Cuscuta has finally been launched online by Dr. Mihai Costea as a next step toward a monograph of the genus. The only comprehensive source of iconography available for Cuscuta
was provided by Yuncker in 1932. His illustrations consisted of line
drawings of flowers, floral parts, capsules, and dissected corollas
(Yuncker 1932). Although line drawings can be quite useful to indicate
shapes and ratios between various floral parts, in the case of this
genus, they are less informative for tridimensional parts, textures,
color, fleshiness and thickness, cell-patterns on various surfaces.
These latter characters can be very important for the
delimitation/identification of Cuscuta species, and they are
visible only in photographs. Such elements of floral morphology have
been made available for the first time in the Digital Atlas of Cuscuta. The site is intended to serve as a comprehensive repository of taxonomic information for Cuscuta
(dodders, Convolvulaceae), as well as an aid for the identification of
its taxa. Type specimens from various herbaria world-wide have been used
to illustrate the taxa. Finally but not last, this is the next
generation in the study of morphology in dodders. All the images in
these galleries were obtained through the fusion of multiple snapshots
taken at successive depths of field, therefore, maximizing the amount of
information contained by the final photographs by coming as close as
possible to 3D images.
