Raunkiær plant life-form
types of plant form as defined by Christen Raunkiær
The Raunkiær system is a system for categorizing plants using life-form categories, devised by Danish botanist Christen C. Raunkiær and later extended by various authors.
History
It was first proposed in a talk to the Danish Botanical Society in 1904 as can be inferred from the printed discussion of that talk, but not the talk itself, nor its title. The journal, Botanisk Tidsskrift, published brief comments on the talk by M. P. Porsild, with replies by Raunkiær. A fuller account appeared in French the following year. Raunkiær elaborated further on the system and published this in Danish in 1907.
The original note and the 1907 paper were much later translated to English and published in 1934 with Raunkiær's collected works.
Modernization
Raunkiær's life-form scheme has subsequently been revised and modified by various authors, but the main structure has survived. Raunkiær's life-form system may be useful in researching the transformations of biotas and the genesis of some groups of phytophagous animals.
Subdivisions
The subdivisions of the Raunkiær system are premised on the location of the bud of a plant during seasons with adverse conditions, i. e.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Raunkiær plant life-form” is types of plant form as defined by Christen Raunkiær. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Raunkiær, plant and life-form, not as a finished interpretation.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q753033. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1904, 1907 and 1934.
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This entry incorporates text from “Raunkiær plant life-form” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.