Introduction

Abstract

The half-day symposium on “Multidisciplinary approaches to the systematics of Compositae”, held as part of the XIV International Botanical Congress in Berlin, on July 26, 1987, was designed to complement the University of Reading Compositae Conference (1975). The latter had yielded two impressive and thorough volumes on “The biology and chemistry of the Compositae”, which were edited by Heywood, Harborne & Turner (1977). The 1987 Berlin Symposium did not attempt to update the information from the earlier conference but instead focussed on selected new methods for investigating the systematics of the family as well as a few examples of new systematic approaches with classical methods.