Fritz Schweingruber was an outstanding tree ring researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research in Birmensdorf, Switzerland, who, unfortunately, passed away before the book’s publication. He collected most of the samples in the High Arctic of Canada, Greenland and Russia during his adventurous expeditions. Sample processing and description was mainly his responsibility.
Miroslav Dvorský is a researcher at the Institute of Botany in Třeboň, Czech Academy of Sciences, focusing on alpine plants. He prepared species annotations regarding morphology, distribution, and ecology, gathered photos, and wrote parts of the introduction.
Annett Börner has been working in the field of scientific publishing for more than fifteen years and took up the challenge of designing and editing the book. She lives in Adelaide, Australia.
Jiří Doležal is a researcher at the Institute of Botany in Třeboň, Czech Academy of Sciences, focusing on alpine plants. He collected most of the samples in the Himalayas, Cameroon, Japan and the Rockies.
This is the first book to provide comprehensive information on the anatomy and ecology of arctic and alpine plants from cold sites around the globe, including representative species from Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, Himalaya, Japan, Argentina, Ecuador and Western USA. It presents the study sites, including characteristic landscape and vegetation photographs. It also discusses species distribution, habitat preferences and features plant pictures, particularly focusing on the specific stem anatomical features, which differ in many cases from temperate zone herbs. Furthermore, each plant is characterized according to a newly constructed codification system. Based on the first author’s 20-years of field research, a close collaboration with numerous botanical gardens, and the vast ecological experience of the other authors, the book presents approximately 350 species. The general layout is comparable to Doležal et al’s 2018 book Anatomy, Age and Ecology of High Mountain Plants in Ladakh, the Western Himalaya.