Ever since the first human ancestors realised that some plants were safe to eat whilst others were not, and some plants promoted health or well-being or created desirable altered mental states, we’ve been interested in identifying plants. And of course, being human, our brains are particularly well-designed to function as pattern-recognition instruments. So it comes naturally for us to classify everything around us based on their shared characteristics.
Taxonomy is a scientific discipline that identifies, describes, and names individual types of organisms and classifies them into groups based upon shared characters. Plant fanciers and farmers have often laboured in complete obscurity during the past thousand or more years to classify plants, but they’ve helped build a clearer understanding of the natural world so we all can communicate and think about it in an organised way.
This scientific field is critically important because it provides the bedrock of so many human endeavours, from medicine to food production. It also provides the basis of research into fundamental questions such as “what is a species?” and “which species is this?”
When Swedish scientist, Carl von Linné -- better known by the Latinised name, Carolus Linnaeus -- came along, the world was ripe for the classification of organisms to be formalised into a systematic field of study. This field, taxonomy, relies on written descriptions and drawings of a “type specimen” that is an average representation for an entire species, or taxon, and that type specimen is carefully preserved in a museum.
Linnaeus designed and developed his taxonomic system by studying and classifying plants. Originally, it was thought there were perhaps 10,000 plant species out there, but after taxonomists began their work, it quickly became obvious that this was a gross underestimate. The vast majority of plant species alive today are classified as flowering plants. In a paper published in 2008, scientists working at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew estimated there are 352,000 extant species of flowering plants (Magnoliophyta). But because many groups of flowering plants have yet to be assessed, the true number probably exceeds 400,000 species.
For more than a century, taxonomic information was locked away in a variety of dusty journals in vast libraries, where most people could not find or access it. Meanwhile, science marches onward at an ever-increasing rate of speed, which makes it important to rapidly access this information. To address this problem, Kew created a global online resource that catalogues the taxonomy of monocot plants. (Monocots comprise roughly one-fifth of all flowering plants.)
This resource, eMonocot, unlocks biodiversity data for monocots for the first time so anyone -- whether a senior-level researcher or a student writing a school report -- can access the latest tools for identification and descriptions as well as up-to-date checklists, along with links to other resources. This video tells you more about this project:
Film created by LonelyLeap.
Cited:
Paton A.J., Brummitt N., Govaerts R., Harman K., Hinchcliffe S., Allkin B. & Lughadha E.N. (2008). Towards Target 1 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation: A Working List of All Known Plant Species-Progress and Prospects, Taxon, 57 (2) 602-611.
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When she’s not communing with nature, GrrlScientist can also be found here: Maniraptora. She’s very active on twitter @GrrlScientist and sometimes lurks on social media: facebook, G+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
