Educational Resources

Importance of gymnosperms

The world and human civilization would be very different if there were no pines, redwoods, spruces, and other gymnosperms. These trees form extensive forests in many cooler and colder regions of the world. These forests provide lumber for millions of homes, wood for many other uses, most of our paper, and habitat for many species of wildlife. These forests improve the air we breathe, producing oxygen and storing carbon dioxide.

Activities for getting to know the gymnosperms

These activity sheets are available for use in classrooms. The activities introduce students to the morphology of gymnosperms and products made using these plants. Click on any of the links below to download the activity sheets and information on conducting these activities.

Gymnosperms in everyday life

Timber
Character categories include ovulate cone structure, pollen cone structure, leaf morphology and venation, and wood anatomy.    We will include characters, many likely to be preserved in fossils, which have proven to be systematically informative across seed plants.    The inclusion of living exemplars in morphological analyses is critical. Thus, the extant gymnosperms on our core taxa sampling list will also be scored for the morphological character set.

Ornamental trees
Cedars, pines, spruces, hemlocks, junipers, yews, and many other gymnosperms are valuable ornamentals. Conifers are used as Christmas trees. It is surprising that some prized gymnosperm ornamentals have much smaller geographic ranges than they had at some time in past and appear to be on the brink of extinction in the wild. The maidenhair tree (ginkgo), for example, is extremely rare in nature and has persisted in the world for thousands of years mostly as ornamentals near religious buildings in eastern Asia. The dawn redwood was thought to be a fossil until it was seen in a remote valley in China in the 1940’s. Despite their tenuous status in nature, Ginkgo and the dawn redwood both grow very well as ornamentals along the streets of large cities. If you have even eaten pine nuts (one of the ingredients in pesto, sometimes available as a topping on pizza, etc.), then you have eaten the seeds of the pinyon pine.

Interesting facts

Gymnosperms are also fascinating organisms.

• They include the tallest trees (redwoods), most massive trees (giant sequoias), and longest living trees (bristlecone pines).
• They are an old group that dominated the earth during the time of dinosaurs, long before the origin of flowering plants such as lilies, roses, and oaks.
• Gymnosperm genomes are huge, in some cases at least ten times the size of the human genome, and organized in unique ways.
• Despite their prominence in the world, we still have a lot to be learned about these fascinating plants. For instance, we are uncertain about many of the evolutionary or phylogenetic relationships among the approximately 1100 species of living gymnosperms. We are also uncertain about fundamental relationships among these living gymnosperms and extinct groups of gymnosperms plus the other major group of seed plants, the flowering plants. A clearer view of the phylogeny of seed plants is critical to our knowledge and appreciation of these important organisms.

(Content by Margaret Connolly and Christopher Campbell, University of Maine)