Priyanka yadav Academic Content Writer at Edumarz
- Diversity means a variety of living organisms. This includes potted plants, insects, birds, your pets or other animals, plants, and microorganisms that cannot be seen with our naked eye, but they are all around us. It s represented as a species. These species are known and described between 1.7 to 1.8 million. This number refers to Biodiversity or Biological diversity on earth. It means the number and type of organisms present on the earth. It is not limited to the existing life forms. If we explore new areas and even older areas, new living organisms are constantly being added. This vast available diversity cannot be studied and identified without a proper system of classification and nomenclature.
- Systematics:- Systematics is the branch of science that deals with the study of unique properties of species and groups to identify, describe, name, and arrange the diverse organisms according to an organized scheme.
Systematics word is derived from the Latin word ‘Systema’, which means orderly arrangement of an organisms. The term systematics was given by Linnaeus in 1751. He used Systema Naturae as the title of his book. Later the scope of the methodology was expanded to include identification, nomenclature, and classification. Systematics takes into described the evolutionary relationships between organisms.
- Identification:- Identification is the process of finding the correct name and proper position of an organism.
- Nomenclature:– Nomenclature is the process of standardizing the nomenclature of living organisms in a such way that these particular organisms are known by the same name all over the world. To facilitate the study, many scientists have established procedures for giving scientific names to each known organism. It is acceptable to biologists around the world. For plants, scientific names are based on agreed principles and criteria, which are provided for in the International Code for Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN) and animals are provided in International Code for Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN). These scientific names have two components: The Generic name and The Specific epithet. These two components are known as Binominal nomenclature. The Binomial nomenclature was given by Swedish naturalist Car von Linnaeus.
For example, The biological nomenclature of mango is written as Mangifera indica. According to binomial nomenclature first name represents the genus Mangifera and India is a species or specific epithet.
- The Universal rule of nomenclature are:
- The scientific name is usually in Latin and written in italics. They are Latinised or derived from Latin regardless of their origin.
- The first word in the binomial name represents the genus while the second component denotes the specific epithet.
- Binomial nomenclature, when handwritten, are underlined separately, or printed in italics to indicate their Latin origin.
- The first word denoting the genus begins with a capital letter while the specific epithet begins with a small letter. Example: Mangifera indica .
- Classification:- Classification is the process by which anything is grouped into categories based on easily observable characters. For example, we can easily identify groups by observable characters such as plants or animals or dogs, cats or insects.
- Taxonomy:- It is the science of characterization, identification, classification, and nomenclature. Based on characteristics, all living organisms can be classified into different taxa which are known as taxonomy. Carolus Linnaeus is the father of taxonomy. The basis of modern taxonomy studies is the external and internal structure along with the structure of cells, developmental process, and ecological information of organisms which provide information according to similarities, dissimilarities, and evolutionary relationships of different organisms.