OPTIMA Newsletter 38

General Topics
1. 0BFranco PEDROTTI – Cartografia geobotanica.
– Pitagora, Bologna, 2004.
(ISBN 88-371-1487-7). VIII + 236 pages,
illustrations (photographs, drawings,
graphs, maps) in black-and-white and
colour; laminated cover.
With the present volume Franco Pedrotti
offers to students and practitioners a
complete textbook for botanical mapping
purposes. Using the traditional, wide definition
of the term geobotany, he presents definitions,
examples and procedural rules for
any conceivable kind of map, from chorological
representations (showing the distribution
of genotypes in populations, of individual
species or higher taxa, or vegetation
units) through classical vegetation maps to
the spatial assessment of diversity or the
visualisation of developmental prospects and
impacts. Mapping procedures and techniques
are discussed for each of these many
categories, which are generously illustrated
with concrete examples not only from Italy
but anywhere in the world.
The book is not, in the first place, an aid
for interpreting maps. Rather, it offers guidance
to authors in the choice of the type of
map and procedure of mapping best suited
for their given subject and scope. It may al-
NOTICES OF PUBLICATIONSF
2009 OPTIMA Newsletter No. 38 (1)
*
by WERNER GREUTER
so, coincidentally, provide the critical reader
with sound criteria for assessing the merits
of relevant publications.
W.G.
2. 1BCharlie JARVIS – Order out of chaos.
Linnaean plant names and their types.
– Linnean Society of London & Natural
History Museum, London, 2007. (ISBN
978-0-9506207-7-0). XI + 1017 pages,
photographs and facsimiles in blackand-white
and colour; hard cover with
dust jacket.
What a beautiful title: “Order out of
chaos”. It is doubly appropriate, first in recalling
the great Linnaeus’s achievement, to
order by means of his new System the previously
chaotic botanical knowledge and
make it readily accessible through the shortcut
of binominal designations; and again in
referring to the major uncertainty and disorder
into which Linnaeus’s nomenclature and
the application of his names had fallen in the
course of a quarter millennium, and setting
matters straight with the panacea of this
book.
Charlie Jarvis has been in charge of the
Linnean Plant Name Typification Project
since it was launched in 1981, based at the
Natural History Museum that had been
founded in South Kensington exactly one
* Please send all items for announcement or review directly to the column editor: Prof.
W. Greuter, Herbarium Mediterraneum, Giardino Botanico, Via Lincoln 2/A, I-90123
Palermo.