Book Reviews and Announcements

This book will present all the literature about heavy metal plants in South Central Africa, i.e. Zaire, Zambia, and Zimbabwe with the aim of an increased accessibility of non-English papers to English readers. Due to the steady destruction of the heavy metal vegetation by mining activities such a synthesis on the origin and evolution, phytosociology, phytochemistry, and physiology of the heavy metal tolerant plants in Africa should be very welcome. It is a great disadvantage of this book, that the authors demonstrate a very superficial handling of data. According to figure 1, heavy metal plants are not present in Central and Western Europe; but even localities such as Sisenga (Drew & Reilly 1972) in Zambia are missing. Ernst (1974) should have described a plant association “Mohrio-Batopedinetum pulvinellati (Tab. 4.4), which he never has mentioned.