Learning a little about botany

Good my steemians today I bring you a topic regarding the botanical classification, because recently at work I have to design a slogan regarding the care of the environment, plants and their botanical fauna.

Botany means the identification of plant species. The branch of biology that deals with this task is called systematic or, according to the authors and interpretations, taxonomy. The system not only deals with plants, but also with the classification of all living beings in general. Explaining this topic exhaustively on a page is impossible, given its immensity and complexity. Another obstacle is represented by the fact that not all scholars, and consequently not all texts, agree on certain classifications or classification systems. Below is a summary, designed for simple and non-expert enthusiasts, which contains the minimum bases to understand the classification tables found on this site.

A botanical classification table is the description of a plant by using a series of standardized terms, derived from Latin, Greek or modern Latinized languages. This description is dendritic (that is, a tree). From top to bottom, increasingly limited groups of specimens are identified, starting from the most generic previous groups to a specific group. In practice, it is a system of assemblies and subsets.

The information of primary interest for non-experts is family, gender and species. The family identifies a group of plants with certain general characteristics; the genus identifies a particular type of plant within a given family; the species identifies a specific type of plant that belongs to a given genus. The classification in some cases can also advance with other indications, since it is possible to have subspecies, hybrids (crosses between two species) and cultivars (genetic selections with particular transmissible characteristics).

Fuente

The scientific name of a plant is indicated through a system called binomial nomenclature, which uses two terms: the first is the genus (generic name), with the initial capital, the second is the species (specific name), with the name initial lowercase To these two terms you can add other information, such as the subspecies, the hybrid or the cultivar. Finally, we mention the name of the botanist who identified gender and / or species (there can also be two or more different scholars), which is indicated by standardized and unified abbreviations. If in a text the full scientific name, or the genus, has already been cited completely once, in the following the generic name can be abbreviated to the initial followed by a period. By convention, in a text, the scientific name must be written in cursive (inclined) characters.

As an example, this is the classification of a very common plant, the Margarita field or margarita:

Kingdom: Plantae
Subcontract: Tracheobionta
Superdivision: Spermatophyta
Division: Magnoliophyta
Class: Magnoliopsida
Subclass: Asteridae
Order: Asterales
Family: Asteraceae
Genus: Bellis L.
Species: Bellis perennis L.

The abbreviation "L." represents Linnaeus (Carl Linnaeus), the famous botanist, who in this case identified both gender and species.