Talk:Conifer

Oldest and largest living thing claims

This article claims that the oldest, largest and tallest living things are conifers. However, some claim that creosote bushes in the Mojave Desert are older and a type of fungus is larger. -- Kjkolb 08:20, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Those are clonal colonies, not individual organisms. Single individuals within those colonies are not old, large or tall. - MPF 23:59, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Taxonomy schemes and specifically pinophyta

There are a number of schemes on the web and other places with regard to the organization of the gymnoperms and the name of the division that includes the pines. This article has decided to use pinophyta, but there are a lot of sources that use Coniferophyta. My question is how is it decided to use one name instead of another and one scheme instead of another? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.218.59.251 (talk) 21:46, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Botanical names used in Wikipedia must correspond to the ICBN, or the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature. Coniferophyta is the older, outdated name, but some sources may still be using it. Dilbert 21:15, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

The most widely used older name is actually Coniferae, which is listed by the ICBN as a valid alternative name to Pinophyta (ICBN Art. 16.1, Ex. 2); it doesn't mention Coniferophyta, which may not be a valid name - MPF 00:53, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Nevertheless, the fact remains that NCBI uses Coniferophyta (and also Coniferales.) NCBI (the National Center for Biotechnology Information) is the arm of the U.S. NIH (National Institutes of Science) that maintains the NIH standard for plant and animal taxonomy, so it appears that this issue is not all that clear-cut, even though there may be other important authorities that don't agree. For my work (I research dictionaries), I am pretty persuaded by the NIH standard. The whole issue is monumentally petty and silly and causes a lot of nuisance for the rest of us, and I suppose it is for this reason that the Tree of Life website (in line with the practice of APG, it appears) simply calls the groups "Conifers" and declines to make any further subdivisions until the family level. In any case, I think it is not accurate to present a monolithic view of the issue. NaySay 16:41, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Image:Taxaceae.png

Shouldn't the following image contain Callitropsis and others? Or possibly lop off the genera?

Also, shouldn't the branching at the left have Taxaceae at the far left with the three lines emerging to the right? I may alter it if necessary. --Kalmia 20:16, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Callitropsis is in Cupressaceae, not Taxaceae, so it doesn't belong on this diagram (I can add it to Image:Cupressaceae.PNG, but that's easier said than done, given the current evidence, which suggests that Cupressus is probably paraphyletic with respect to Callitropsis and Juniperus (Little, D. P., Schwarzbach, A. E., Adams, R. P. & Hsieh, Chang-Fu. 2004. The circumscription and phylogenetic relationships of Callitropsis and the newly described genus Xanthocyparis (Cupressaceae). Amer. J. Bot. 91 (11): 1872–1881). Not sure what you mean in the second para; Cupressus and Sciadopitys are included as outgroups (basically, an 'anchor' for analysing the relationships within the Taxaceae s.l.), and the diagram is correctly formed - MPF 21:35, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Phylogeny

I see that the phylogeny included in the article does not include the Gnetophytes. I haven't had a chance to check the Farjon et al. reference, but most recent molecular analyses have included Gnetum, Ephedra, Welwitschia as a clade nested within a monophyletic gymnosperm clade, I believe as sister to the Pinophyta clade. MrDarwin 16:18, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

It seems to change daily, though. I'm not sure it's most, but rather some. KP Botany 17:06, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Great source on conifers in SEAsia

For all work on conifers in SEAsia, I highly recommend the online source called "Conifers of Vietnam - An illustrated field guide for the most important forest trees" @ [1]. Rdavout (talk) 22:13, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Reference Edits

I am a TA for an introductory biology course, and the students in my class will be verifying information and adding references from peer-reviewed scientific literature to this article as a class assignment between July 8-18th. I have instructed them to post notes about the changes they are making (or considering) on this discussion page. The may also be editing or adding to existing content as part of their improvement and clarification work. --EricaVE —Preceding unsigned comment added by EricaVE (talk • contribs) 22:21, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

BSC2011L

I haven't been able to find any sources or any other information for Invasive species. I did find some sources and other information for the evolution. Could you guys look for invasive species also? I will try to look over the other parts as well. Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bfoppe (talk • contribs) 23:58, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Broad Leaf vs conifers

I came here looking info on what (if any) way conifers are useful in reducing CO2 ? My own belief is they are no way near as good as Broadleaf trees. 213.122.103.72 (talk) 15:02, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

External links modified

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Rename to "Conifer"?

I don't see any discussion of this. Conifer seems (IMO, no references) to be the more common name. Power~enwiki (talk) 02:37, 31 July 2017 (UTC)

Coniferous vs Evergreen

I've often heard trees that were not deciduous referred to as "coniferous." However, conifers are not the only evergreens. It might be prudent to address this in the disambiguation statement. 184.17.162.236 (talk) 17:41, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

and, not all conifers are evergreen (see Larch)Darorcilmir (talk) 04:54, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

Conifers are particularly effective at removing particulate matter, add?

• Vittoria Traverso The best trees to reduce air pollution 4 May 2020 BBC

X1\ (talk) 06:39, 12 May 2020 (UTC)

Requested move 1 March 2021

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: moved. (non-admin closure) ~SS49~ {talk} 09:27, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

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Pinophyta → Conifer – WP:COMMONNAME. Most people on this talk page refer to this subject as "Conifer". It's definitely a more popular term on NGRAM [2]. The page merge that resulted in the unified page title "Pinophyta" was done unilaterally; I found no prior discussion on it. Mottezen (talk) 06:52, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

• Support While I generally prefer to use scientific names, there's a good case for using "conifer".
  1. The ranks used for subdivisions in the higher classification of plants vary widely between sources, and treating conifers as a division is far from universal. So a rank-based name is problematic without a consensus classification to use.
  2. "Coniferae" is a legitimate descriptive name in the ICNafp. "Conifer" is an obvious English name equivalent to "Coniferae" and is, as far as I can tell, unambiguous.
  3. Fern is a parallel case, where there are also systems that use very different ranks – and there's less precision, since the modern sense of "ferns" includes "horsetails".

Peter coxhead (talk) 10:21, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

• Support per WP:COMMONNAME. Rreagan007 (talk) 16:52, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
• Support per WP:COMMONNAME. --JOJ ^Hutton 10:35, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.