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Proteaceae is a family of flowering plants that includes genera
planted for their nuts (Macadamia), flowers (Banksia, Protea),
and wood (Grevillea). In total, the family consists of 80 genera
and about 1800 species. It is strikingly diverse in the Cape of
South Africa, the sandplains of southwestern Australia, the
rainforests of northeastern Australia, and New Caledonia.
The fossil history for the family is ancient (to 90 million years
ago) and extensive, and it reveals much about the diversification
of the southern hemisphere flora following the break-up of the
supercontinent Gondwana. This is especially true on the island
continent of Australia, where three of the ten largest genera of
flowering plants are members of the family.
This site is dedicated to facilitating research on the Proteaceae
and communicating that research to everyone who is interested. The site is largely database driven. To encourage collaboration in the maintenance of the site, registered users can add and edit data stored here. The literature page is not currently database driven, but will be made so in the near future. This will permit users to add and edit citations, as well as associate short annotations with the citations. Other additions await funding. These additions include front-end pages for user manipulation of the taxon table, an RSS feed, a geographic distribution table, a synonyms table, a fossil taxon table, and a chromosome count table.
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