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Support the Flora of the Southeastern US

2024 has been a banner year for making the best flora we can imagine. We've created:
With financial support from people like you, we are aiming even higher in 2025. Together we can accomplish all this: Vote on our 2025 priorities
  • Add Global Conservation Ranks (GRanks) vote
  • Professional graphic keys (polyclaves) to individual families/genera vote
  • 2 new FloraQuest apps: Florida & Mid-South vote
  • Image overlays highlighting diagnostic characters with arrows vote
  • iNaturalist integration in FloraQuest vote
Write-in vote: vote
We've set a goal of recruiting 200 ongoing supporters to donate $15 or more each month in 2025. Please help us reach this goal and make next year's flora even better:

Click the number at the start of a key lead to highlight both that lead and its corresponding lead. Click again to show only the two highlighted leads. Click a third time to return to the full key with the selected leads still highlighted.

Key A: lycophytes and pteridophytes

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1 Plant minute, consisting of filaments or thalli (undifferentiated into leaves, stems, and roots), generally a single cell thick, usually with abundant single-celled gemmae (specialized budlike groups of cells for asexual reproduction), and superficially resembling bryophytes in lacking vascular tissue; [usually epipetric on vertical or overhanging bedrock; [Pteridophytes]
1 Plant more complex, with vascular tissue, with stems (or rhizomes), leaves, and roots, the leaves generally > 1 cell thick (except in sporophytes of Hymenophyllaceae), reproducing by spores; [growing in very diverse habitats, including on bedrock]; [Lycophytes, Pteridophytes].
  2 Plant aquatic, either floating and unattached, or rooting and largely submersed
  2 Plant of various habitats, including wetlands, where sometimes growing in soils saturated or intermittently flooded, but not aquatic.
    3 Leaves ‘fern-like’: variously lobed or divided, ranging from pinnatifid to 4-pinnate; [Pteridophytes].
      4 Leaf blades (not including the petiole) small, < 30 cm long or wide (some species will key either here or in the next lead).
        5 Epipetric or epiphytic, growing on rock, tree bark, walls, or over rock in thin soil mats or in small soil pockets
      4 Leaf blades medium to large, > 30 cm long or wide.
          6 Epipetric or epiphytic, growing on rock, walls, over rock in thin soil mats or in small soil pockets, or on tree trunks