Members of the iceplant family, Aizoaceae, are appreciated by many people and disliked by some. Farmers value the plants for their browsing stock, hobbyists like to grow and flower mainly the "stone plants" of the family, and tourists enjoy the mass flowering of millions of annuals after good rains in the south western part of South Africa. Only taxonomists show some reservation against members of the Aizoaceae because of the size of the family and the confused and entangled systematics of many groups. For all groups of users, this book will offer some improvements. A worldwide web has been knitted among hundreds of interested people resulting in the pro­ duction of this lexicon. As a consequence of the expanded collaboration over five continents, innumerable new results can be presented here, including many new delimitations of genera as well as new combinations and names of species. All conclusions are based on thousands of days spent on field work, thousands of original literature references inspected, thousands of herbarium sheets studied, thousands of scanning electron microscopic pictures compared, thousands of photographs taken, and thousands of taxonomic decisions made. As a result of all united efforts, an up-to-date survey of the state of the art can be presented, forming the basis for further research in the family and providing a challenge to every reader to add his special knowledge towards an improved second edition.

Assisted by: P. Chesselet, D.T. Cole, N.A. Cole, M. Gerbaulet, L.B. Groen, S.A: Hammer, H.E.K. Hartmann, H.-D. Ihlenfeldt, C. Klak, I.M. Niesler, S.M. Pierce, N. Zimmermann