1.
Astrophyton
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The giant basket star, Astrophyton muricatum, is an echinoderm found in shallow parts of the tropical western Atlantic and throughout the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. It is the species in the genus Astrophyton. During the day, it curls up into a ball shape to protect itself from predators. At night, it climbs to a point to feed by extending its intricately branched feeding arms in a bowl-like shape in order to snare passing plankton. The giant basket star is a very large echinoderm that can reach a diameter of nearly a metre when its arms are fully extended and it has a central disc and eight slender, flexible arms that repeatedly divide to form a fine-meshed net-like structure. The colour is brown or black. This basket star is found in regions of the western Atlantic Ocean. Its range extends from Cape Lookout in North Carolina to the coast of Brazil at about 20°S and it is found at depths down to about 30 m. Although it is found on coral reefs, it also occurs on the top of boulders or in seagrass meadows. The species is nocturnal and spends the day in a hiding place and it only feeds when the water conditions are optimal. When the current is too strong it keeps its arms folded up but at moderate current speed it climbs to an elevated position, the arms are much branched and the mesh size is small, so it probably captures a wide variety of prey. When feeding, it orientates itself towards the current in order to maximise its food collection ability, when it touches a food particle, the smallest branches close around it to form a ball which is then moved to the mouth. Even small juvenile fishes, shrimps and similar-sized organisms can be captured by these means, typical perches are on the top of large corals or the top of gorgonians, and it uses the lower parts of the arms to hold itself in place. During the day it retreats down to the base of the coral or gorgonian, if a light is shone on it while it is feeding at night, it curls itself up, taking several minutes to become a fist-sized structure. The shrimp Periclimenes perryae often lives in association with the giant basket star, and larger individuals are usually coloured to match the colour of the basket star
2.
Astrophytum ornatum
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Astrophytum ornatum, also called bishops cap, is endemic to the Central Plateau of Mexico. It is the largest and tallest species of Astrophytum, solitary and cylindrical in form it may grow up to 2 metres in height and thirty centimeters in width on the Central Plateau. It develops numerous white woolly flakes for protection from the sun and it flowers throughout the summer, flowers are seven to eight centimeters long in canary yellow. It is a rugged plant resistant to rot, and easy to grow in a well drained soil. It is dark green when grown in filtered light or shade, an established plant is cold tolerant to the mid to low twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Astrophytum ornatum on Astroweb Astrophytum ornatum on Astrobase Simon & Schusters Guide to Cacti and Succulents, Pizzetti, ISBN 0-671-60231-4 photos on www. AIAPS. org Star Cactus
3.
Taxonomy (biology)
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Taxonomy is the science of defining groups of biological organisms on the basis of shared characteristics and giving names to those groups. The exact definition of taxonomy varies from source to source, but the core of the remains, the conception, naming. There is some disagreement as to whether biological nomenclature is considered a part of taxonomy, the broadest meaning of taxonomy is used here. The word taxonomy was introduced in 1813 by Candolle, in his Théorie élémentaire de la botanique, the term alpha taxonomy is primarily used today to refer to the discipline of finding, describing, and naming taxa, particularly species. In earlier literature, the term had a different meaning, referring to morphological taxonomy, ideals can, it may be said, never be completely realized. They have, however, a value of acting as permanent stimulants. Some of us please ourselves by thinking we are now groping in a beta taxonomy, turrill thus explicitly excludes from alpha taxonomy various areas of study that he includes within taxonomy as a whole, such as ecology, physiology, genetics, and cytology. He further excludes phylogenetic reconstruction from alpha taxonomy, thus, Ernst Mayr in 1968 defined beta taxonomy as the classification of ranks higher than species. This activity is what the term denotes, it is also referred to as beta taxonomy. How species should be defined in a group of organisms gives rise to practical and theoretical problems that are referred to as the species problem. The scientific work of deciding how to define species has been called microtaxonomy, by extension, macrotaxonomy is the study of groups at higher taxonomic ranks, from subgenus and above only, than species. While some descriptions of taxonomic history attempt to date taxonomy to ancient civilizations, earlier works were primarily descriptive, and focused on plants that were useful in agriculture or medicine. There are a number of stages in scientific thinking. Early taxonomy was based on criteria, the so-called artificial systems. Later came systems based on a complete consideration of the characteristics of taxa, referred to as natural systems, such as those of de Jussieu, de Candolle and Bentham. The publication of Charles Darwins Origin of Species led to new ways of thinking about classification based on evolutionary relationships and this was the concept of phyletic systems, from 1883 onwards. This approach was typified by those of Eichler and Engler, the advent of molecular genetics and statistical methodology allowed the creation of the modern era of phylogenetic systems based on cladistics, rather than morphology alone. Taxonomy has been called the worlds oldest profession, and naming and classifying our surroundings has likely been taking place as long as mankind has been able to communicate
4.
Plant
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Plants are mainly multicellular, predominantly photosynthetic eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae. The term is generally limited to the green plants, which form an unranked clade Viridiplantae. This includes the plants, conifers and other gymnosperms, ferns, clubmosses, hornworts, liverworts, mosses and the green algae. Green plants have cell walls containing cellulose and obtain most of their energy from sunlight via photosynthesis by primary chloroplasts and their chloroplasts contain chlorophylls a and b, which gives them their green color. Some plants are parasitic and have lost the ability to produce amounts of chlorophyll or to photosynthesize. Plants are characterized by sexual reproduction and alternation of generations, although reproduction is also common. There are about 300–315 thousand species of plants, of which the great majority, green plants provide most of the worlds molecular oxygen and are the basis of most of Earths ecologies, especially on land. Plants that produce grains, fruits and vegetables form humankinds basic foodstuffs, Plants play many roles in culture. They are used as ornaments and, until recently and in variety, they have served as the source of most medicines. The scientific study of plants is known as botany, a branch of biology, Plants are one of the two groups into which all living things were traditionally divided, the other is animals. The division goes back at least as far as Aristotle, who distinguished between plants, which generally do not move, and animals, which often are mobile to catch their food. Much later, when Linnaeus created the basis of the system of scientific classification. Since then, it has become clear that the plant kingdom as originally defined included several unrelated groups, however, these organisms are still often considered plants, particularly in popular contexts. When the name Plantae or plant is applied to a group of organisms or taxon. The evolutionary history of plants is not yet settled. Those which have been called plants are in bold, the way in which the groups of green algae are combined and named varies considerably between authors. Algae comprise several different groups of organisms which produce energy through photosynthesis, most conspicuous among the algae are the seaweeds, multicellular algae that may roughly resemble land plants, but are classified among the brown, red and green algae. Each of these groups also includes various microscopic and single-celled organisms
5.
Flowering plant
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The flowering plants, also known as Angiospermae or Magnoliophyta, are the most diverse group of land plants, with 416 families, approx. 13,164 known genera and a total of c.295,383 known species, etymologically, angiosperm means a plant that produces seeds within an enclosure, in other words, a fruiting plant. The term angiosperm comes from the Greek composite word meaning enclosed seeds, the ancestors of flowering plants diverged from gymnosperms in the Triassic Period, during the range 245 to 202 million years ago, and the first flowering plants are known from 160 mya. They diversified extensively during the Lower Cretaceous, became widespread by 120 mya, angiosperms differ from other seed plants in several ways, described in the table. These distinguishing characteristics taken together have made the angiosperms the most diverse and numerous land plants, the amount and complexity of tissue-formation in flowering plants exceeds that of gymnosperms. The vascular bundles of the stem are arranged such that the xylem and phloem form concentric rings, in the dicotyledons, the bundles in the very young stem are arranged in an open ring, separating a central pith from an outer cortex. In each bundle, separating the xylem and phloem, is a layer of meristem or active formative tissue known as cambium, the soft phloem becomes crushed, but the hard wood persists and forms the bulk of the stem and branches of the woody perennial. Among the monocotyledons, the bundles are more numerous in the stem and are scattered through the ground tissue. They contain no cambium and once formed the stem increases in diameter only in exceptional cases, the characteristic feature of angiosperms is the flower. Flowers show remarkable variation in form and elaboration, and provide the most trustworthy external characteristics for establishing relationships among angiosperm species, the function of the flower is to ensure fertilization of the ovule and development of fruit containing seeds. The floral apparatus may arise terminally on a shoot or from the axil of a leaf, occasionally, as in violets, a flower arises singly in the axil of an ordinary foliage-leaf. There are two kinds of cells produced by flowers. Microspores, which divide to become pollen grains, are the male cells and are borne in the stamens. The female cells called megaspores, which divide to become the egg cell, are contained in the ovule. The flower may consist only of parts, as in willow. Usually, other structures are present and serve to protect the sporophylls, the individual members of these surrounding structures are known as sepals and petals. The outer series is usually green and leaf-like, and functions to protect the rest of the flower, the inner series is, in general, white or brightly colored, and is more delicate in structure. It functions to attract insect or bird pollinators, attraction is effected by color, scent, and nectar, which may be secreted in some part of the flower
6.
Eudicots
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The eudicots, Eudicotidae or eudicotyledons are a monophyletic clade of flowering plants that had been called tricolpates or non-magnoliid dicots by previous authors. The close relationships among flowering plants with tricolpate pollen grains was initially seen in studies of shared derived characters. These plants have a trait in their pollen grains of exhibiting three colpi or grooves paralleling the polar axis. Later molecular evidence confirmed the basis for the evolutionary relationships among flowering plants with tricolpate pollen grains. The term means true dicotyledons, as it contains the majority of plants that have been considered dicots and have characteristics of the dicots, the term eudicots has subsequently been widely adopted in botany to refer to one of the two largest clades of angiosperms, monocots being the other. The remaining angiosperms are sometimes referred to as basal angiosperms or paleodicots, the other name for the eudicots is tricolpates, a name which refers to the grooved structure of the pollen. Members of the group have tricolpate pollen, or forms derived from it and these pollens have three or more pores set in furrows called colpi. In contrast, most of the seed plants produce monosulcate pollen. The name tricolpates is preferred by some botanists to avoid confusion with the dicots, numerous familiar plants are eudicots, including many common food plants, trees, and ornamentals. Most leafy trees of midlatitudes also belong to eudicots, with exceptions being magnolias and tulip trees which belong to magnoliids, and Ginkgo biloba. The name eudicots is used in the APG system, of 1998 and it is applied to a clade, a monophyletic group, which includes most of the dicots. The eudicots can be divided into two groups, the basal eudicots and the core eudicots, basal eudicot is an informal name for a paraphyletic group. The core eudicots are a monophyletic group, a 2010 study suggested the core eudicots can be divided into two clades, Gunnerales and a clade called Pentapetalae, comprising all the remaining core eudicots
7.
Caryophyllales
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Caryophyllales is an order of flowering plants that includes the cacti, carnations, amaranths, ice plants, beets, and many carnivorous plants. Many members are succulent, having fleshy stems or leaves, the members of Caryophyllales include about 6% of eudicot species. This order is part of the core eudicots, currently, the Caryophyllales contains 33 families,692 genera and 11,155 species. As with all taxa, the circumscription of Caryophyllales has changed within various classification systems, all systems recognize a core of families with centrospermous ovules and seeds. More recent treatments have expanded the Caryophyllales to include many carnivorous plants, although the monophyly of the order has been strongly supported, their placement is still uncertain. Systematists are undecided on whether Caryophyllales should be placed within the complex or sister to the asterid clade. This primitive flower might well be found in stock as Wernham, Bessy. Caryophyllales is separated into two suborders, Caryophyllineae and Polygonineae and these two suborders were formerly recognized as two orders, Polygonales and Caryophyllales. As circumscribed by the APG III system, this includes the same families as the APG II system plus the new families, Limeaceae, Lophiocarpaceae, Montiaceae, Talinaceae. Kewaceae, Limeaceae, Macarthuriaceae, Microteaceae, and Petiveriaceae were added in APG IV, recent molecular and biochemical evidence has resolved additional well-supported clades within the Caryophyllales. The APG favours much larger orders and families, and the order Caryophyllales sensu APG should rather be compared to subclass Caryophyllidae sensu Cronquist, a part of the difference lies with what families are recognized. The plants in the Stegnospermataceae and Barbeuiaceae were included in Cronquists Phytolaccaceae, the Chenopodiaceae are included in Amaranthaceae by APG. New to the order are the Asteropeiaceae and Physenaceae, each containing a single genus, earlier systems, such as the Wettstein system, last edition in 1935, and the Engler system, updated in 1964, had a similar order under the name Centrospermae. Tree of Life Characteristics and Phylogenetic Relationships
8.
Cactus
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A cactus is a member of the plant family Cactaceae, a family comprising about 127 genera with some 1750 known species of the order Caryophyllales. The word cactus derives, through Latin, from the Ancient Greek κάκτος, kaktos, Cacti occur in a wide range of shapes and sizes. Most cacti live in habitats subject to at least some drought, many live in extremely dry environments, even being found in the Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on earth. Cacti show many adaptations to conserve water, almost all cacti are succulents, meaning they have thickened, fleshy parts adapted to store water. Unlike many other succulents, the stem is the part of most cacti where this vital process takes place. Most species of cacti have lost true leaves, retaining only spines, as well as defending against herbivores, spines help prevent water loss by reducing air flow close to the cactus and providing some shade. In the absence of leaves, enlarged stems carry out photosynthesis, Cacti are native to the Americas, ranging from Patagonia in the south to parts of western Canada in the north—except for Rhipsalis baccifera, which also grows in Africa and Sri Lanka. Cactus spines are produced from specialized structures called areoles, a kind of highly reduced branch, areoles are an identifying feature of cacti. As well as spines, areoles give rise to flowers, which are usually tubular, Cactus stems are often ribbed or fluted, which allows them to expand and contract easily for quick water absorption after rain, followed by long drought periods. Like other succulent plants, most cacti employ a mechanism called crassulacean acid metabolism as part of photosynthesis. Transpiration, during which carbon enters the plant and water escapes, does not take place during the day at the same time as photosynthesis. The plant stores the carbon dioxide it takes in as malic acid, retaining it until daylight returns, because transpiration takes place during the cooler, more humid night hours, water loss is significantly reduced. Many smaller cacti have globe-shaped stems, combining the highest possible volume for water storage, the tallest free-standing cactus is Pachycereus pringlei, with a maximum recorded height of 19.2 m, and the smallest is Blossfeldia liliputiana, only about 1 cm in diameter at maturity. A fully grown saguaro is said to be able to absorb as much as 200 U. S. gallons of water during a rainstorm, a few species differ significantly in appearance from most of the family. At least superficially, plants of the genus Pereskia resemble other trees and they have persistent leaves, and when older, bark-covered stems. Their areoles identify them as cacti, and in spite of their appearance, they, Pereskia is considered close to the ancestral species from which all cacti evolved. In tropical regions, other cacti grow as forest climbers and epiphytes and their stems are typically flattened, almost leaf-like in appearance, with fewer or even no spines, such as the well-known Christmas cactus or Thanksgiving cactus. Cacti have a variety of uses, many species are used as ornamental plants, others are grown for fodder or forage, cochineal is the product of an insect that lives on some cacti
9.
Cactoideae
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The Cactoideae are the largest subfamily of the cactus family, Cactaceae. These plants are variable in habit, including, treelike, shrubby, caespitose, climbing. They grow from 1 centimetre to 20 metres in height, reproductive zones are usually undifferentiated, sometimes differentiated, or specific cephalium produced. Leaves are absent or rarely vestigial, spines are usually present or rarely absent. Flowers are sessile, diurnal, or nocturnal,1 -30 cm in diameter, white, yellow, orange, red, purple, pink, fruits are usually fresh and berry-like, and the seeds are small,0.1 -2.0 mm in size. Tribes within the Cactoideae subfamily include, Browningieae Cacteae Calymmantheae Cereeae Hylocereeae Notocacteae Pachycereeae Rhipsalideae Trichocereeae
10.
Cacteae
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Cacteae is a tribe of plants belonging to the family Cactaceae. They consist of species that either have no leaves at all, some have scales that resemble leaves, but the majority have leaf-bases that have been fused either into ribs or tubercles. The Cacteae tribe is very large, comprising almost 75% of all the Cactaceae, as a result it has been sub-divided into eight sub-tribes, these being as follows, Cactanae, Cactinae, Cereinae, Echinocactinae, Echinocereinae, Epiphyllinae, Hylocereinae, and Rhipsalidinae. Members of this tribe have been moved around and often placed in other tribes, similar to Echinocactinae, these plants tend to have either globular or stumpy cylindrical main stems. They dont branch, but may produce offshoots from the base and they have ribs that are fused together tubercles, so much so that there is only a vague bump where the areoles are. The plants also develop a pronounced, wooly, and occasionally bristly cephalium from which the flowers appear, there are only two genera comprising this subtribe, Discocactus and Melocactus. This is quite an important subtribe, especially to cactus-lovers, as it contains the large Mamillaria genus. This may not be as large as the Opuntia genus but it more than its fair share of hybrids. They all produce globular stems and most produce offshoots freely, the tubercles are generally arranged in spirals. The principal genera of this subtribe are Coryphantha, and Mamillaria and sometimes taking 30-years for just one branch to form Most of these plants grow erect and they generally have a thick, columnar, main stem from which branches eventually grow. These branches eventually also grow branches leading to a shape in very old specimens. They almost always have pronounced ribs with areoles that normally have many spines, the principal genera are Cephalocereus, Cereus_, Cleistocactus, Espostoa, and Oreocereus. This sub-tribe is composed of species with globular stems which may have branches, the plants can grow to quite a large size overall. Member genera are amongst the strangest, slowest growing, and difficult cacti, principal genera are Echinocactus, Ferocactus, Gymnocalycium, and Parodia. Due to the members rather prickly appearance it was given the Greek name for the porcupine. The plants are also mainly low-growing, globular, clustering species, the stems generally have raised ribs or vertical lines of tubercles. There are seven genera in the subtribe, the ones being Echinocereus, Echinopsis. Almost all epiphytes, these species are unlike the typical vision of cacti and they grow in tropical forests and thrive in hot and damp conditions
11.
Charles Antoine Lemaire
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Charles Antoine Lemaire, was a French botanist and botanical author, noted for his publications on Cactaceae. Born the son of Antoine Charles Lemaire and Marie Jeanne Davio, he had an excellent early education and he studied at the University of Paris and was appointed as Professor of Classical Literature there. At some stage his botanical interest was sparked and developed by his association with M. Neumann, horticulturist at the Museum of Natural History. He worked for some time as an assistant to M. Mathieu, at a nursery in Paris, building up a collection of Cactaceae, in 1835, M. Cousin, a Parisian publisher, started a gardening journal and requested that he be its editor. For a number of years, he remained editor of Jardin Fleuriste and LHorticulteur Universel, during this period his principal artist was Jean-Christophe Heyland. In 1845 Lemaire moved to Ghent as editor of the journal Flore des Serres et des Jardins de lEurope, started by Louis van Houtte. In 1854 he turned to editing LIllustration Horticole, also in Ghent and owned by Ambroise Verschaffelt, in addition to his enormous contributions to the journals he edited, Lemaire also published numerous papers on the Cactaceae and succulents. Some of these are Cactearum aliquot novarum, Cactearum genera nova speciesque novae, Iconographie descriptive des Cactées, one of the notable genera he named was Schlumbergera which contains the well-known Christmas Cactus. He never published a work on the Cactaceae, despite having collected all the material. He always lived in semi-poverty and never attracted the attention of a wealthy sponsor, edouard Andre, who succeeded him as editor of LIllustration Horticole, felt that Posterity will esteem M. Lemaire more highly than did his contemporaries. The Australian genus of herbaceous shrubs Maireana is named in his honour, works by or about Charles Antoine Lemaire at Internet Archive
12.
Species
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In biology, a species is the basic unit of biological classification and a taxonomic rank. A species is defined as the largest group of organisms in which two individuals can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction. While this definition is often adequate, looked at more closely it is problematic, for example, with hybridisation, in a species complex of hundreds of similar microspecies, or in a ring species, the boundaries between closely related species become unclear. Other ways of defining species include similarity of DNA, morphology, all species are given a two-part name, a binomial. The first part of a binomial is the genus to which the species belongs, the second part is called the specific name or the specific epithet. For example, Boa constrictor is one of four species of the Boa genus, Species were seen from the time of Aristotle until the 18th century as fixed kinds that could be arranged in a hierarchy, the great chain of being. In the 19th century, biologists grasped that species could evolve given sufficient time, Charles Darwins 1859 book The Origin of Species explained how species could arise by natural selection. Genes can sometimes be exchanged between species by horizontal transfer, and species may become extinct for a variety of reasons. In his biology, Aristotle used the term γένος to mean a kind, such as a bird or fish, a kind was distinguished by its attributes, for instance, a bird has feathers, a beak, wings, a hard-shelled egg, and warm blood. A form was distinguished by being shared by all its members, Aristotle believed all kinds and forms to be distinct and unchanging. His approach remained influential until the Renaissance, when observers in the Early Modern period began to develop systems of organization for living things, they placed each kind of animal or plant into a context. Many of these early delineation schemes would now be considered whimsical, animals likewise that differ specifically preserve their distinct species permanently, one species never springs from the seed of another nor vice versa. In the 18th century, the Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus classified organisms according to shared physical characteristics and he established the idea of a taxonomic hierarchy of classification based upon observable characteristics and intended to reflect natural relationships. At the time, however, it was widely believed that there was no organic connection between species, no matter how similar they appeared. However, whether or not it was supposed to be fixed, by the 19th century, naturalists understood that species could change form over time, and that the history of the planet provided enough time for major changes. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, in his 1809 Zoological Philosophy, described the transmutation of species, proposing that a species could change over time, in 1859, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace provided a compelling account of evolution and the formation of new species. Darwin argued that it was populations that evolved, not individuals and this required a new definition of species. Darwin concluded that species are what appear to be, ideas
13.
Astrophytum asterias
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Astrophytum asterias is a species of cactus in the genus Astrophytum, and is native to small parts of Texas in the United States and Mexico. Common names include Sand Dollar Cactus, Sea Urchin Cactus, Star Cactus, a. asterias is small, round, spineless and squat, reaching a height of 2. 5–6 cm and a diameter of 5–15 cm. The disc-shaped body is divided into 7 -10 sections, known as ribs, the body is a greenish-brown colour and may appear speckled from its covering of white scales. The flowers of this cactus are yellow with red bases and the parts are very woolly. Green to pink oval fruits are produced, the coat is covered with woolly hairs. Reproduction takes place via sexual outcrossing through cross-pollination, star cacti reach sexual maturity after a few years, flowers are produced from March to June and fruiting occurs from April to June, the specific pollinators have not been identified but are thought to be insects. The plant also bears a close resemblance to the relatively unrelated Euphorbia obesa. Star cactus is native to the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas in the United States, previously more abundant, this species is today restricted to a single 200-acre site in Texas, where there are around 2,000 individuals, and a few small sites in Tamaulipas. Today this species is associated with scrub, amongst rocky ground, it may have previously occupied richer. It has probably been extirpated from Nuevo León, Sand Dollar Cactus has been grown as a houseplant since the 1840s, like other members of its genus and despite its rarity in the wild. It is readily propagated from seed, so most plants encountered in nurseries are seed grown, the popularity of this species among collectors and enthusiasts has ensured that a number of cultivars are available. One such cultivar is the Super Kabuto, a clonally propagated variety whose large trichomes congregate into dense spots, despite this protection, illegal collection continues to threaten the future of this species. And its decline in the wild has been attributed to over-collection. It is sometimes accidentally harvested due to its similarity to the closely related, other contributing factors are thought to be urban development and herbicides. Habitat destruction has been, and remains, the cause of the decline in this species, vast areas have been converted to agricultural use. In Texas, mechanical and chemical bush clearing techniques together with the introduction of invasive grasses have had devastating effects, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service have drafted a Recovery Plan in an attempt to secure the future of this species. This article incorporates text from the ARKive fact-file Astrophytum asterias under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, Astrophytum asterias media at ARKive Astrophytum asterias on Astroweb Astrophytum asterias on Astrobase photos on www. cactiguide. com photos on www. AIAPS. org
14.
Astrophytum capricorne
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Astrophytum capricorne, also known as the Goats horn cactus, is native to the Coahuila regions of Northern Mexico. The common name of Goats horn cactus corresponds to the species identifier capricorne referring to the spines that are said to resemble a goats horns. This species is designated as of least concern by the IUCN as the species is distributed in the Chihuahuan desert. This species is grown, typically from seed, as a plant as it produces large. Some cultivars bear white flecking on the plant body while others lack this feature, mandujano, Maria, Bravo, Yolotzin, Verhulst, Johannes, Carrillo-Angeles, Israel, Golubov, Jordan. The population dynamics of an endemic collectible cactus, Astrophytum capricorne on Astroweb Astrophytum capricorne on Astrobase Star Cactus. Photos on www. AIAPS. org photos on www. cactiguide. com
15.
Astrophytum myriostigma
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Astrophytum myriostigma is a species of cactus native to the highlands of northeastern and central Mexico. Synonyms include Echinocactus myriostigma, Astrophytum prismaticum, A. columnare, A. coahuilense, A. tulense, a. myriostigma is a spineless cactus defined by the presence of three to seven pronounced vertical ribs which define the cactus shape when young. As the cactus ages, more ribs may be added and it becomes more cylindrical in shape, growing up to about 70–100 cm tall, in the wild, globose to cylindrical stem is covered with a whitish flocking of trichomes. Some horticultural varieties lack the flocking, in the wild, the cacti flower in early spring, so that their seeds can grow with summer rains. In cultivation this differs, and the plants may flower in summer, plants produce one or more flowers 4–6 cm diameter near the apex, the numerous tepals are creamy yellow, sometimes with an orange or red base. Pollinated flowers develop into a hairy reddish fruit about 2-2.5 cm in diameter, plants may take up to six years to flower. A. myriostigma is commonly grown as a plant in cactus collections. This plant has gained the Royal Horticultural Societys Award of Garden Merit, photos on www. AIAPS. org photos on www. cactiguide. com
16.
Genus
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A genus is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms in biology. In the hierarchy of classification, genus comes above species. In binomial nomenclature, the name forms the first part of the binomial species name for each species within the genus. Felis catus and Felis silvestris are two species within the genus Felis, Felis is a genus within the family Felidae. The composition of a genus is determined by a taxonomist, the standards for genus classification are not strictly codified, so different authorities often produce different classifications for genera. Moreover, genera should be composed of units of the same kind as other genera. The term comes from the Latin genus, a noun form cognate with gignere, linnaeus popularized its use in his 1753 Species Plantarum, but the French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort is considered the founder of the modern concept of genera. The scientific name of a genus may be called the name or generic epithet. It plays a role in binomial nomenclature, the system of naming organisms. The rules for the names of organisms are laid down in the Nomenclature Codes. The standard way of scientifically describing species and other lower-ranked taxa is by binomial nomenclature, the generic name forms its first half. For example, the gray wolfs binomial name is Canis lupus, with Canis being the name shared by the wolfs close relatives. The specific name is written in lower-case and may be followed by names in zoology or a variety of infraspecific names in botany. Especially with these names, when the generic name is known from context. Because animals are typically only grouped within subspecies, it is written as a trinomen with a third name. Dog breeds, meanwhile, are not scientifically distinguished, there are several divisions of plant species and therefore their infraspecific names generally include contractions explaining the relation. For example, the genus Hibiscus includes hundreds of other species apart from the Rose of Sharon or common garden hibiscus, Rose of Sharon doesnt have subspecies but has cultivars that carry desired traits, such as the bright white H. syriaca Diana. Hawaiian hibiscus, meanwhile, includes several separate species, since not all botanists agree on the divisions or names between species, it is common to specify the source of the name using author abbreviations
17.
Lithops
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Lithops is a genus of succulent plants in the ice plant family, Aizoaceae. Members of the genus are native to southern Africa, the name is derived from the Ancient Greek words λίθος, meaning stone, and ὄψ, meaning face, referring to the stone-like appearance of the plants. They avoid being eaten by blending in with surrounding rocks and are known as pebble plants or living stones. The formation of the name from the Greek -ops means that even a plant is called a Lithops. Individual Lithops plants consist of one or more pairs of bulbous, almost fused leaves opposite to each other, the slit between the leaves contains the meristem and produces flowers and new leaves. During winter a new pair, or occasionally more than one. In spring the old leaf pair parts to reveal the new leaves, Lithops leaves may shrink and disappear below ground level during drought. Lithops in habitat almost never have more than one pair per head. Yellow or white flowers emerge from the fissure between the leaves after the new leaf pair has fully matured, one per leaf pair and this is usually in autumn, but can be before the summer solstice in L. pseudotruncatella and after the winter solstice in L. optica. The flowers are sweetly scented. The most startling adaptation of Lithops is the colouring of the leaves, the markings function as remarkable camouflage for the plant in its typical stone-like environment. As is typical of a plant, the green tissue lines the inside of the leaves and is covered with translucent tissue beneath the epidermal windows. Lithops are obligate outcrossers and require pollination from a separate plant, like most mesembs, Lithops fruit is a dry capsule that opens when it becomes wet, some seeds may be ejected by falling raindrops, and the capsule re-closes when it dries out. Capsules may also sometimes detach and be distributed intact, or may disintegrate after several years, Lithops occur naturally across wide areas of Namibia and South Africa, as well as small bordering areas in Botswana and possibly Angola, from sea level to high mountains. Nearly a thousand individual populations are documented, each covering just an area of dry grassland, veld. Different Lithops species are found in particular environments, usually restricted to a particular type of rock. Lithops have not naturalised outside this region, rainfall in Lithops habitats ranges from approximately 700 mm/year to near zero. Rainfall patterns range from exclusively summer rain to exclusively winter rain, temperatures are usually hot in summer and cool to cold in winter, but one species is found right at the coast with very moderate temperatures year round
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Aizoaceae
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Aizoaceae or Ficoidaceae is a family of dicotyledonous flowering plants containing 135 genera and about 1900 species. They are commonly known as stone plants, carpet weeds or vygies, species that resemble stones or pebbles are sometimes called mesembs. Several species are known as ice plants because of the glistening globular bladder cells covering their stems, fruit, the family is widely recognised by taxonomists, although once it went by the botanical name Ficoideae, now disallowed. The APG II system of 2003 also recognises the family, the APG II system also classes the former families Mesembryanthemaceae Fenzl, Sesuviaceae Horan. and Tetragoniaceae Link under the family Aizoaceae. Most species in this family are endemic to arid or semiarid parts of southern Africa, but a few are from Australia, most of these species are succulents and belong to the subfamilies Mesembryanthemoideae and Ruschioideae and are loosely termed mesems or mesembs. Most fig-marigolds are herbaceous, rarely somewhat woody, with stems growing erect or prostrate. Leaves are simple, opposite or alternate, and more or less succulent with entire margins, Flowers are perfect in most species, actinomorphic, and appear singularly or in few-flowered cymes developing from the leaf axils. Sepals are typically five and more or less connate below, however, some species have numerous linear petals derived from staminodes. The fruit is a capsule one to numerous seeds per cell. A few species have been introduced and become invasive. They are called ice plant because they have bladder-like hairs on the surface that reflect and refract light in a manner to make it appear that they sparkle like ice crystals. Several Aizoaceae are edible, including, Carpobrotus edulis and Mesembryanthemum crystallinum have edible leaves, a species known as New Zealand spinach is grown as a garden plant in somewhat dry climates and used as an alternative to spinach in upscale salads. Carpobrotus edulis was introduced to California to stabilize soil along railroad tracks, ice plant thrives in southern California. People surround their property with it believing it will act as a firewall to protect against wildfires, ice plant contains so much water, it does not burn if carefully maintained. Aizoanthemum Dinter ex Friedrich Aizoon L. Galenia L. Gunniopsis Pax Plinthus Fenzl Tetragonia L. Cypselea Turpin Sesuvium L. Trianthema L. Tribulocarpus S. Moore Zaleya Burm. f, corbichonia Gisekia Herreanthus Limeum Ophthalmophyllum Saphesia Bittrich V. H. E. K. Hartmann. Cornelia Klak, Angeline Khunou, Gail Reeves, Terry Hedderson, a phylogenetic hypothesis for the Aizoaceae based on four plastid DNA regions. Aizoaceae in L. Watson and M. J. Dallwitz, the families of flowering plants NCBI Taxonomy Browser P. Chesselet. Interactive Mesembs2 Plants of southern Africa, SANBI Aizoaceae of South Africa Family Aizoaceae Flowers in Israel
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Greek language
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Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any living language, spanning 34 centuries of written records and its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the major part of its history, other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were used previously. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic and many other writing systems. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world, during antiquity, Greek was a widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world and many places beyond. It would eventually become the official parlance of the Byzantine Empire, the language is spoken by at least 13.2 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey, and the Greek diaspora. Greek roots are used to coin new words for other languages, Greek. Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, the earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the worlds oldest recorded living language. Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now extinct Anatolian languages, the Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods, Proto-Greek, the unrecorded but assumed last ancestor of all known varieties of Greek. The unity of Proto-Greek would have ended as Hellenic migrants entered the Greek peninsula sometime in the Neolithic era or the Bronze Age, Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Mycenaean civilisation. It is recorded in the Linear B script on tablets dating from the 15th century BC onwards, Ancient Greek, in its various dialects, the language of the Archaic and Classical periods of the ancient Greek civilisation. It was widely known throughout the Roman Empire, after the Roman conquest of Greece, an unofficial bilingualism of Greek and Latin was established in the city of Rome and Koine Greek became a first or second language in the Roman Empire. The origin of Christianity can also be traced through Koine Greek, Medieval Greek, also known as Byzantine Greek, the continuation of Koine Greek in Byzantine Greece, up to the demise of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century. Much of the written Greek that was used as the language of the Byzantine Empire was an eclectic middle-ground variety based on the tradition of written Koine. Modern Greek, Stemming from Medieval Greek, Modern Greek usages can be traced in the Byzantine period and it is the language used by the modern Greeks, and, apart from Standard Modern Greek, there are several dialects of it. In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia, the historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language is often emphasised. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than a foreign language and it is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, Homeric Greek is probably closer to demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English, Greek is spoken by about 13 million people, mainly in Greece, Albania and Cyprus, but also worldwide by the large Greek diaspora. Greek is the language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population
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Synonym
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A synonym is a word or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase in the same language. Words that are synonyms are said to be synonymous, and the state of being a synonym is called synonymy, the word comes from Ancient Greek sýn and ónoma. An example of synonyms are the words begin, start, commence, words can be synonymous when meant in certain senses, even if they are not synonymous in all of their senses. For example, if one talks about a time or an extended time, long. Some academics call the former type cognitive synonyms to distinguish them from the latter type, some lexicographers claim that no synonyms have exactly the same meaning because etymology, orthography, phonic qualities, ambiguous meanings, usage, etc. make them unique. Different words that are similar in meaning usually differ for a reason, feline is more formal than cat, long and extended are only synonyms in one usage, synonyms are also a source of euphemisms. In the figurative sense, two words are said to be synonymous if they have the same connotation. a widespread impression that. Metonymy can sometimes be a form of synonymy, as when, for example, thus a metonym is a type of synonym, and the word metonym is a hyponym of the word synonym. The analysis of synonymy, polysemy, hyponymy, and hypernymy is inherent to taxonomy and it has applications in pedagogy and machine learning, because they rely on word-sense disambiguation and schema. Synonyms can be any part of speech, as long as both words belong to the part of speech. Such like, he expired means the same as he died, in English, many synonyms emerged in the Middle Ages, after the Norman conquest of England. While Englands new ruling class spoke Norman French, the lower classes continued to speak Old English, thus, today we have synonyms like the Norman-derived people, liberty and archer, and the Saxon-derived folk, freedom and bowman. For more examples, see the list of Germanic and Latinate equivalents in English, the purpose of a thesaurus is to offer the user a listing of similar or related words, these are often, but not always, synonyms. The word poecilonym is a synonym of the word synonym. It is not entered in most major dictionaries and is a curiosity or piece of trivia for being a word because of its meta quality as a synonym of synonym. Antonyms are words with opposite or nearly opposite meanings, for example, hot ↔ cold, large ↔ small, thick ↔ thin, synonym ↔ antonym Hypernyms and hyponyms are words that refer to, respectively, a general category and a specific instance of that category. For example, vehicle is a hypernym of car, and car is a hyponym of vehicle, homophones are words that have the same pronunciation, but different meanings. For example, witch and which are homophones in most accents, homographs are words that have the same spelling, but have different pronunciations
21.
Wikidata
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Wikidata is a collaboratively edited knowledge base operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is intended to provide a source of data which can be used by Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia. This is similar to the way Wikimedia Commons provides storage for files and access to those files for all Wikimedia projects. Wikidata is powered by the software Wikibase, Wikidata is a document-oriented database, focused on items. Each item represents a topic and is identified by a number, prefixed with the letter Q—for example. This enables the basic information required to identify the topic the item covers to be translated without favouring any language, information is added to items by creating statements. Statements take the form of pairs, with each statement consisting of a property. The creation of the project was funded by donations from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, at this time, only the first phase was available. Historically, a Wikipedia article would include a list of links, being links to articles on the same topic in other editions of Wikipedia. Initially, Wikidata was a repository of interlanguage links. No Wikipedia language editions were able to access Wikidata, so they needed to continue to maintain their own lists of interlanguage links, on 14 January 2013, the Hungarian Wikipedia became the first to enable the provision of interlanguage links via Wikidata. This functionality was extended to the Hebrew and Italian Wikipedias on 30 January, to the English Wikipedia on 13 February, on 23 September 2013, phase 1 went live on Wikimedia Commons. The first aspects of the second phase were deployed on 4 February 2013, the values were initially limited to two data types, with more data types to follow later. The first new type, string, was deployed on 6 March, the ability of the various language editions of Wikipedia to access data added to Wikidata as part of phase two was rolled out progressively between 27 March and 25 April 2013. On 16 September 2015, Wikidata began allowing so-called arbitrary access, for example, in the past the article about Berlin you could not access data about Germany, but with arbitrary access it could. On 27 April 2016 arbitrary access was activated on Wikimedia Commons, phase 3 will involve database querying and the creation of lists based on data stored on Wikidata. As of October 2016 two tools for querying Wikidata were available, AutoList and PetScan, additionally to a public SPARQL endpoint, there is concern that the project is being influenced by lobbying companies, PR professionals and search engine optimizers. As of December 2015, according to Wikimedia statistics, half of the information in Wikidata is unsourced, another 30% is labeled as having come from Wikipedia, but with no indication as to which article
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Wikispecies
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Wikispecies is a wiki-based online project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aim is to create a free content catalogue of all species. Jimmy Wales stated that editors are not required to fax in their degrees, Wikispecies is available under the GNU Free Documentation License and CC BY-SA3.0. Benedikt Mandl co-ordinated the efforts of people who are interested in getting involved with the project. Databases were evaluated and the administrators contacted, some of them have agreed on providing their data for Wikispecies, the board of directors of the Wikimedia Foundation voted by 4 to 0 in favor of the establishment of a Wikispecies. The project was launched in August 2004 and is hosted at species. wikimedia. org and it was officially merged to a sister project of Wikimedia Foundation on September 14,2004. On October 10,2006, the project exceeded 75,000 articles, on May 20,2007, the project exceeded 100,000 articles with a total of 5,495 registered users. On September 8,2008, the project exceeded 150,000 articles with a total of 9,224 registered users, on October 23,2011, the project reached 300,000 articles. On June 16,2014, the project reached 400,000 articles, on January 7,2017, the project reached 500,000 articles. Wikispecies has disabled local upload and asks users to use images from Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies does not allow the use of content that does not conform to a free license
23.
Encyclopedia of Life
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The Encyclopedia of Life is a free, online collaborative encyclopedia intended to document all of the 1.9 million living species known to science. It is compiled from existing databases and from contributions by experts and non-experts throughout the world and it aims to build one infinitely expandable page for each species, including video, sound, images, graphics, as well as text. In addition, the Encyclopedia incorporates content from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the project was initially backed by a US$50 million funding commitment, led by the MacArthur Foundation and the Sloan Foundation, who provided US$20 million and US$5 million, respectively. The project was led by Jim Edwards and the development team by David Patterson. Today, participating institutions and individual donors continue to support EOL through financial contributions, EOL went live on 26 February 2008 with 30,000 entries. The site immediately proved to be popular, and temporarily had to revert to demonstration pages for two days when it was overrun by traffic from over 11 million views it received. The site relaunched on 5 September 2011 with a redesigned interface, eOLv2 is redesigned to enhance usability and encourage contributions and interactions among users. The product is also internationalized with interfaces provided for English, German, Spanish, French, Galician, Serbian, Macedonian, Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Ukrainian language speakers. On 16 January 2014, EOL launched TraitBank, a searchable, open digital repository for organism traits, measurements, interactions, information about many species is already available from a variety of sources, in particular about the megafauna. Gathering currently available data on all 1.9 million species will take about 10 years, as of September 2011, EOL had information on more than 700,000 species available, along with more than 600,000 photos and millions of pages of scanned literature. The initial focus has been on living species but will later include extinct species, as the discovery of new species is expected to continue, the encyclopedia will grow continuously. The goal of EOL is to serve as a resource for the public, enthusiastic amateurs, educators, students. The Encyclopedia of Life has content partners around the world who share information through the EOL platform, including Wikipedia and its interface is translated at translatewiki. net. The Encyclopedia of Life – Introductory video on YouTube from May 2007
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Global Biodiversity Information Facility
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The Global Biodiversity Information Facility is an international organisation that focuses on making scientific data on biodiversity available via the Internet using web services. The data are provided by institutions from around the world. Data available through the GBIF portal are primarily distribution data on plants, animals, fungi, and microbes for the world, the mission of the Global Biodiversity information Facility is to facilitate free and open access to biodiversity data worldwide to underpin sustainable development. ABCD Schema Atlas of Living Australia Darwin Core Global biodiversity Pacific Biodiversity Information Forum GBIF website Short description of GBIF
25.
INaturalist
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Observations may be added via the website or from a mobile application. The observations provide valuable data to a variety of scientific research projects, museums, botanic gardens, parks. Users of iNaturalist have contributed four million observations since its founding in 2008. INaturalist. org began in 2008 as a UC Berkeley School of Information Masters final project of Nate Agrin, Jessica Kline, Nate Agrin and Ken-ichi Ueda continued work on the site with Sean McGregor, a web developer. In 2011, Ueda began collaboration with Scott Loarie, a fellow at Stanford University. Ueda and Loarie are the current co-directors of iNaturalist. org, on April 24,2014 iNaturalist. org merged with the California Academy of Sciences In 2014, iNaturalist celebrated its one millionth observation. The iNaturalist platform is based on crowdsourcing of data, users of iNaturalist can submit observations of organisms in the form of photographs, sound recordings, or visual sightings. Observations are either casual or research grade, and research grade observations are incorporated into online databases to be utilizable for scientists, iNaturalist is the preferred application for crowd-sourced biodiversity data in Mexico. As of 28 January 2017, the iNaturalist community consisted of almost 400,000 users contributing over 4,300,000 observations of plants, animals, users have created and contributed to over 9000 different projects, spanning hundreds of themes. Project examples include taxa- and location-specific bioblitzes, roadkill observations, animal tracks, the US National Park Service partnered with iNaturalist to record observations from the 2016 National Parks BioBlitz. That project exceeded 100,000 observations in August 2016, list of citizen science projects Official website iNaturalist on Vimeo Introducing iNaturalist by Suzanne Cadwell
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International Plant Names Index
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The International Plant Names Index describes itself as a database of the names and associated basic bibliographical details of seed plants, ferns and lycophytes. Coverage of plant names is best at the rank of species, the IPNI also maintains a list of standardized author abbreviations. These were initially based on Brummitt & Powell, but new names, IPNI is the product of a collaboration between The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, The Harvard University Herbaria, and the Australian National Herbarium. The IPNI database is a collection of the names registered by the three cooperating institutions and they work towards standardizing the information, the standard of author abbreviations recommended by the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants is Brummitt and Powell’s Authors of Plant Names. A digital and continually updated list of authors and abbreviations can be consulted online at IPNI, the IPNI provides names that have appeared in scholarly publications, with the objective of providing an index of published names rather than prescribing the accepted botanical nomenclature. The Plant List, a project which was unveiled in 2010. The use of IPNI is free of charge, a similar project, which lists names of fungi, is the Index Fungorum. The Plant List Official website of the IPNI Plant Name search – IPNI search for plant names Author search – IPNI search for author names and standard abbreviations
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Integrated Taxonomic Information System
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The Integrated Taxonomic Information System is an American partnership of federal agencies designed to provide consistent and reliable information on the taxonomy of biological species. The database draws from a community of taxonomic experts. Primary content staff are housed at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the primary focus of ITIS is North American species, but many groups are worldwide and ITIS continues to collaborate with other international agencies to increase its global coverage. ITIS provides a reference database of scientific and common names for species. As of May 2016, it contains over 839,000 scientific names, synonyms, and common names for terrestrial, marine, data presented in ITIS are considered public information, and may be freely distributed and copied, though appropriate citation is requested. ITIS is frequently used as the de facto source of data in biodiversity informatics projects. It presents the names in a classification that contains author, date, distributional. In addition, common names are available through ITIS in the official languages of the Americas. ITIS and its partner, Species 2000, cooperate to annually produce the Catalogue of Life. The Catalogue of Lifes goal was to complete the global checklist of 1.9 million species by 2011. As of May 2012, the Catalogue of Life has reached 1.4 million species—a major milestone in its quest to complete the first up-to-date comprehensive catalogue of all living organisms, ITIS and the Catalogue of Life are core to the Encyclopedia of Life initiative announced May 2007. EOL will be largely on various Creative Commons licenses. The newer material has been checked to higher standards of taxonomic credibility, biological taxonomy is not fixed, and opinions about the correct status of taxa at all levels, and their correct placement, are constantly revised as a result of new research. Many aspects of classification remain a matter of scientific judgment, the ITIS database is updated to take account of new research as it becomes available, and the information it yields is likely to represent a fair consensus of modern taxonomic opinion. Records within ITIS include information about how far it has been possible to check and its information should be checked against other sources where these are available, and against the primary research scientific literature where possible
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National Center for Biotechnology Information
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The National Center for Biotechnology Information is part of the United States National Library of Medicine, a branch of the National Institutes of Health. The NCBI is located in Bethesda, Maryland and was founded in 1988 through legislation sponsored by Senator Claude Pepper, the NCBI houses a series of databases relevant to biotechnology and biomedicine and is an important resource for bioinformatics tools and services. Major databases include GenBank for DNA sequences and PubMed, a database for the biomedical literature. Other databases include the NCBI Epigenomics database, all these databases are available online through the Entrez search engine. NCBI is directed by David Lipman, one of the authors of the BLAST sequence alignment program. He also leads a research program, including groups led by Stephen Altschul, David Landsman, Eugene Koonin, John Wilbur, Teresa Przytycka. NCBI is listed in the Registry of Research Data Repositories re3data. org, NCBI has had responsibility for making available the GenBank DNA sequence database since 1992. GenBank coordinates with individual laboratories and other databases such as those of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. Since 1992, NCBI has grown to other databases in addition to GenBank. The NCBI assigns a unique identifier to each species of organism, the NCBI has software tools that are available by WWW browsing or by FTP. For example, BLAST is a sequence similarity searching program, BLAST can do sequence comparisons against the GenBank DNA database in less than 15 seconds. RAG2/IL2RG The NCBI Bookshelf is a collection of freely accessible, downloadable, some of the books are online versions of previously published books, while others, such as Coffee Break, are written and edited by NCBI staff. BLAST is a used for calculating sequence similarity between biological sequences such as nucleotide sequences of DNA and amino acid sequences of proteins. BLAST is a tool for finding sequences similar to the query sequence within the same organism or in different organisms. It searches the query sequence on NCBI databases and servers and post the results back to the browser in chosen format. Input sequences to the BLAST are mostly in FASTA or Genbank format while output could be delivered in variety of such as HTML, XML formatting. HTML is the output format for NCBIs web-page. Entrez is both indexing and retrieval system having data from sources for biomedical research
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Natural Resources Conservation Service
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Its name was changed in 1994 during the presidency of Bill Clinton to reflect its broader mission. It is a small agency, currently comprising about 11,000 employees. Its mission is to improve, protect, and conserve resources on private lands through a cooperative partnership with state. While its primary focus has been agricultural lands, it has many technical contributions to soil surveying, classification. NRCS is the agency in this project. The agency was founded largely through the efforts of Hugh Hammond Bennett, bennetts motivation was based on his knowledge of the detrimental effects of soil erosion and the impacts on U. S lands that led to the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. On September 13,1933, the Soil Erosion Service was formed in the Department of the Interior, the Soil Conservation Service was in charge of 500 Civilian Conservation Corps camps between 1933 and 1942. The primary purpose of these camps was erosion control, Hugh Bennett continued as chief, a position he held until his retirement in 1952. On October 20,1994, the agency was renamed to the Natural Resources Conservation Service as part of the Federal Crop Insurance Reform, NRCS offers technical and financial assistance to farmers and ranchers. The financial assistance is authorized by the Farm Bill, a law that is renewed every five years, the 2014 Farm Bill consolidated 23 programs into 15. NRCS offers these services to land owners, conservation districts, tribes. NRCS also collects and shares information on the soil, water, air. The Conservation Title of the Farm Bill provides the funding to agricultural producers, all of these programs are voluntary. Conservation Stewardship Program CSP is targeted to ag producers who maintain a level of environmental stewardship. Regional Conservation Partnership Program RCPP consolidated four programs from the prior 2008 Farm Bill and it aims at more regional or watershed scale projects, rather than individual farms and ranches. ACEP includes technical and financial help to maintain or improve land for agriculture or environmental benefits, landowners volunteer to restore and protect forests in 30 or 10 year contracts. This program hands assisting funds to participants, the project began in 2010 and initially focused on the Mississippi Basin area. The main goal of the project is to implement better methods of managing water drainage from agricultural uses, in October 2011, The National Managing Water, Harvesting Results Summit was held to promote the drainage techniques used in hopes of people adopting them nationwide
Media related to Astrophytum at Wikimedia Commons
Data related to Astrophytum at Wikispecies
