Tag: biodiversity and classification

• Both John Ray and Linnaeus proposed Morphospecies concept.
  
• Morphological Species Concept characterizes a species by body shape and other structural features and is applied to asexual and sexual organisms. It differs from the modern concept of species where a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring are said to belonging to same species. 
  
• Darwin proposed the theory of biological evolution.

Taxonomy is defined as the description, identification, nomenclature, and classification of organisms. Carolus Linnaeus is known as the father of taxonomy.

Artificial systems of classification were based upon morphological characters {such as habit, habitat, colour, number and shape of leaves, etc.) for grouping of organisms. They were mainly based on vegetative characters or on the androecium structure. These systems separated the closely related species since they were based only on a few characteristics.

Species Plantarum, (1753), two-volume work by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, in which he established a precise and workable two-word, or binomial, system for naming plants. This system forms the basis of modern plant taxonomy. In this master work Linnaeus described 6,000 species of plants and assigned each plant a genus name and a species name, the genus representing a group of plants, the species designating specific individuals within a given genus. Species Plantarum was the first work that consistently applied a referable system of nomenclature; it was a vast improvement over the cumbersome polynomial descriptions generally used before its publication. The first edition of Species Plantarum (with the 1754 edition of an earlier work, Genera Plantarum) has been internationally accepted as the starting point in the nomenclature of flowering plants and ferns.

The kingdom Protista includes diverse forms of predominantly water-dwelling, eukaryotic unicellular micro-organisms. Some of these organisms are animal-like(protozoan), others resemble plants (algal protists), and others demonstrate the characters of fungi. In kingdom Protista, all organism are unicellular during most phases of their life cycle or are colonial. Thus option D is the correct answer. 

Kingdom protists, Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia belong to domain eukarya and include only eukaryotic organisms. Kingdom monera includes unicellular prokaryotic organisms that lack a well-defined nucleus and other membrane-bound organelles.Thus, the correct answer is option A.

If we accept May's global estimates only 22% of the total species have been recorded so far. If May's proposal for discovery of new species is accepted then there are probably more than 1,00,000 plant species and more than 3,00,000 animal species yet to discovered and described.

Species diversity is the variety in the number and richness of the species of a region, Western Ghats have greater amphibian species diversity as compared to eastern ghats.

Vertical distribution of different species occupying different levels is called stratification. For example, trees occupy top vertical strata or layer of a forest, strubs the second and herbs and grasses occupy the bottom layers.