Botany, also called plant science, plant biology or phytology, is the science of plant life and a branch of biology. A botanist, plant scientist or phytologist is a scientist who specialises in this field. The term "botany" comes from the Ancient Greek word βοτάνη meaning "pasture", "herbs" "grass", or "fodder"; βοτάνη is in turn derived from βόσκειν, "to feed" or "to graze". Traditionally, botany has also included the study of fungi and algae by mycologists and phycologists respectively, with the study of these three groups of organisms remaining within the sphere of interest of the International Botanical Congress. Nowadays, botanists study approximately 410,000 species of land plants of which some 391,000 species are vascular plants, and approximately 20,000 are bryophytes.
Systematics is the study of the diversification of living forms, both past and present, and the relationships among living things through time. Relationships are visualized as evolutionary trees. Phylogenies have two components: branching order and branch length. Phylogenetic trees of species and higher taxa are used to study the evolution of traits and the distribution of organisms (biogeography). Systematics, in other words, is used to understand the evolutionary history of life on Earth.
In biology, taxonomy is the scientific study of naming, defining (circumscribing) and classifying groups of biological organisms based on shared characteristics. Organisms are grouped into taxa and these groups are given a taxonomic rank; groups of a given rank can be aggregated to form a more inclusive group of higher rank, thus creating a taxonomic hierarchy. The principal ranks in modern use are domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus is regarded as the founder of the current system of taxonomy, as he developed a ranked system known as Linnaean taxonomy for categorizing organisms and binomial nomenclature for naming organisms.
Paleoecology is the study of interactions between organisms and/or interactions between organisms and their environments across geologic timescales. As a discipline, paleoecology interacts with, depends on and informs a variety of fields including paleontology, ecology, climatology and biology.
In biology, an identification key, taxonomic key, or biological key is a printed or computer-aided device that aids the identification of biological entities, such as plants, animals, fossils, microorganisms, and pollen grains. Identification keys are also used in many other scientific and technical fields to identify various kinds of entities, such as diseases, soil types, minerals, or archaeological and anthropological artifacts.
Plant taxonomy is the science that finds, identifies, describes, classifies, and names plants. It is one of the main branches of taxonomy.
A flower, also known as a bloom or blossom, is the reproductive structure found in flowering plants. Flowers consist of a combination of vegetative organs – sepals that enclose and protect the developing flower, petals that attract pollinators, and reproductive organs that produce gametophytes, which in flowering plants produce gametes. The male gametophytes, which produce sperm, are enclosed within pollen grains produced in the anthers. The female gametophytes are contained within the ovules produced in the carpels.
Automated species identification is a method of making the expertise of taxonomists available to ecologists, parataxonomists and others via digital technology and artificial intelligence. Today, most automated identification systems rely on images depicting the species for the identification. Based on precisely identified images of a species, a classifier is trained. Once exposed to a sufficient amount of training data, this classifier can then identify the trained species on previously unseen images.
Identification in biology is the process of assigning a pre-existing taxon name to an individual organism. Identification of organisms to individual scientific names may be based on individualistic natural body features, experimentally created individual markers, or natural individualistic molecular markers. Individual identification is used in ecology, wildlife management and conservation biology. The more common form of identification is the identification of organisms to common names or scientific name. By necessity this is based on inherited features ("characters") of the sexual organisms, the inheritance forming the basis of defining a class. The features may, e. g., be morphological, anatomical, physiological, behavioral, or molecular.
In biology or medicine, a multi-access key is an identification key which overcomes the problem of the more traditional single-access keys of requiring a fixed sequence of identification steps. A multi-access key enables the user to freely choose the characteristics that are convenient to evaluate for the item to be identified.
In phylogenetics, a single-access key is an identification key where the sequence and structure of identification steps is fixed by the author of the key. At each point in the decision process, multiple alternatives are offered, each leading to a result or a further choice. The alternatives are commonly called "leads", and the set of leads at a given point a "couplet".
A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction. It is the basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. Other ways of defining species include their karyotype, DNA sequence, morphology, behaviour, or ecological niche. In addition, paleontologists use the concept of the chronospecies since fossil reproduction cannot be examined.
DNA barcoding is a method of species identification using a short section of DNA from a specific gene or genes. The premise of DNA barcoding is that by comparison with a reference library of such DNA sections, an individual sequence can be used to uniquely identify an organism to species, just as a supermarket scanner uses the familiar black stripes of the UPC barcode to identify an item in its stock against its reference database. These "barcodes" are sometimes used in an effort to identify unknown species or parts of an organism, simply to catalog as many taxa as possible, or to compare with traditional taxonomy in an effort to determine species boundaries.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to evolution:
Pollen DNA barcoding is the process of identifying pollen donor plant species through the amplification and sequencing of specific, conserved regions of plant DNA. Being able to accurately identify pollen has a wide range of applications though it has been difficult in the past due to the limitations of microscopic identification of pollen.
DNA barcoding is an alternative method to the traditional morphological taxonomic classification, and has frequently been used to identify species of aquatic macroinvertebrates. Many are crucial indicator organisms in the bioassessment of freshwater and marine ecosystems.
Microbial DNA barcoding is the use of DNA metabarcoding to characterize a mixture of microorganisms. DNA metabarcoding is a method of DNA barcoding that uses universal genetic markers to identify DNA of a mixture of organisms.
DNA barcoding methods for fish are used to identify groups of fish based on DNA sequences within selected regions of a genome. These methods can be used to study fish, as genetic material, in the form of environmental DNA (eDNA) or cells, is freely diffused in the water. This allows researchers to identify which species are present in a body of water by collecting a water sample, extracting DNA from the sample and isolating DNA sequences that are specific for the species of interest. Barcoding methods can also be used for biomonitoring and food safety validation, animal diet assessment, assessment of food webs and species distribution, and for detection of invasive species.
DNA barcoding in diet assessment is the use of DNA barcoding to analyse the diet of organisms. and further detect and describe their trophic interactions. This approach is based on the identification of consumed species by characterization of DNA present in dietary samples, e.g. individual food remains, regurgitates, gut and fecal samples, homogenized body of the host organism, target of the diet study.
Metabarcoding is the barcoding of DNA/RNA in a manner that allows for the simultaneous identification of many taxa within the same sample. The main difference between barcoding and metabarcoding is that metabarcoding does not focus on one specific organism, but instead aims to determine species composition within a sample.
