How many conifers

You might have an evergreen tree in your home or workplace this month, but here at USGS, many of our scientists get to enjoy beautiful pines, firs, and cypresses year round in their outdoor workplaces! In this series, we'll explore what conifers are and how USGS scientists study them. To start: what exactly is a conifer? Conifers are trees that bear their seeds in cones hence the name conifer. The vast majority of conifers have needle-like e.

Conifers are an ancient group of plants, splitting off from close relatives like ginkgos and cycads more than million years ago. Before the evolution of flowering plants, conifers dominated forests around the world. One of the photos at the bottom of this post shows conifer fossils from the time of the dinosaurs! Today, there are about conifer species. Though we often associate evergreen trees with cold, snowy, forests, conifers can be found in all kinds of temperate, arid and tropical ecosystems, such as shrublands, savannas, and even swamps.

But there are extraordinary conifers around the world—from California's redwoods to the South American monkey puzzle tree, both pictured at the bottom of this post. They store carbon and provide habitat and food for animals and other organisms. They give humans shade and lumber and firewood and pine nuts and juniper berries. Conifer trees are important as carbon sinks, as the photosynthesis removes carbon from the atmosphere and their giant trunks can store immense amounts of carbon for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Conifers provide important habitat and shelter for many animal species. Fast growth and good wood properties make many species of conifer ideal for timber. Conifers also have global importance for their use as pulp for the production of paper, cultural values such as Christmas trees and some species have edible seeds. Reproduction within conifers is relatively simple when compared to the mechanism used by angiosperms. Huge amounts of pollen, which is produced in the male cones, is transported by the wind with the hope that some pollen will reach the female cones of another tree and fertilize them.

Once fertilized, female cones will begin to grow seeds. It can take up to two years for the seeds within a female cone to grow to maturity, at which time the cones will drop onto the ground or release the seeds from the cone. Some of the oldest existing lineages of trees are conifers which have fossil records stretching back as far as million years ago. Conifer is the common name for the division of gymnosperms known as Pinophyta.

Within the Pinophyta, all conifers belong to a class called Pinopsida and sub-class Pinadae. The sub-class Pinadae has 3 orders Pinales, Araucariales and Cupressales and a total of 7 families. Learn about animals, plants, evolution, the tree of life, ecology, cells, genetics, fields of biology and more.

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Know the answer? Earle, C. The Gymnosperm Database. Conifers, 2nd ed. Portland: Timber Press, Toggle navigation. Photo by: Mark Ross. Other articles you might like:. User Contributions:.

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