Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jul 16, 2026

Najas

Najas, the water-nymphs or naiads, is a genus of aquatic plants. It is cosmopolitan in distribution, first described for modern science by Linnaeus in 1753. Until 1997, it was rarely placed in the Hydrocharitaceae, and was often taken as constituting the family Najadaceae.

Last revised
Jul 16, 2026
Read time
≈ 3 min
Length
695 w
Citations
11
Source
Najas
Najas marina1
Scientific classification Edit this classification
Kingdom: Plantae
Clade: Tracheophytes
Clade: Angiosperms
Clade: Monocots
Order: Alismatales
Family: Hydrocharitaceae
Subfamily: Hydrilloideae
Genus: Najas
L.
Synonyms2
  • Fluvialis Ség
  • Caulinia Willd.
  • Ittnera C.C.Gmel.

Najas, the water-nymphs3 or naiads, is a genus of aquatic plants. It is cosmopolitan in distribution, first described for modern science by Linnaeus in 1753. Until 1997, it was rarely placed in the Hydrocharitaceae,4567 and was often taken as constituting (by itself) the family Najadaceae.8

The APG II system, of 2003 (unchanged from the APG system, of 1998), places the genus in family Hydrocharitaceae, in the order Alismatales of the monocots.7

An infrageneric classification of two sections is proposed: Section Americanae and sect. Caulinia.9

Species2
References

References

  1. Otto Wilhelm Thomé. Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz 1885, Gera, Germany
  2. Kew World Checklist of Selected Plant Families
  3. NRCS. "Najas". PLANTS Database. United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Retrieved 16 July 2015.
  4. Tanaka, Norio; Setoguchi, Hiroaki; Murata, Jin (1997), "Phylogeny of the family hydrocharitaceae inferred fromrbcL andmatK gene sequence data", Journal of Plant Research, 110 (3): 329–337, Bibcode:1997JPlR..110..329T, doi:10.1007/BF02524931, S2CID 10939773
  5. Les, DH; Cleland, MA; Waycott, M (1997), "Phylogenetic studies in Alismatidae, II: Evolution of Marine Angiosperms (Seagrasses) and Hydrophily", Systematic Botany, 22 (3): 443, Bibcode:1997SysBo..22..443L, doi:10.2307/2419820, JSTOR 2419820
  6. Genera of Hydrocharitaceae, GRIN Taxonomy for Plants
  7. Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (2003). "An update of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group classification for the orders and families of flowering plants: APG II". Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society 141(4): 399-436. (Available online: Abstract | Full text (HTML) | Full text (PDF))
  8. 197. Najadaceae A. L. de Jussieu, Flora of North America
  9. Ito, Y., Nr. Tanaka, S.W. Gale, O. Yano, J. Li (2017) "Phylogeny of Najas (Hydrocharitaceae) revisited: Implications for systematics and evolution". Taxon 66(2): 309-323. doi: 10.12705/662.2
External links