1.
Bamboo
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The bamboos /bæmˈbuː/ are evergreen perennial flowering plants in the subfamily Bambusoideae of the grass family Poaceae. The dicotyledonous woody xylem is also absent, the absence of secondary growth wood causes the stems of monocots, including the palms and large bamboos, to be columnar rather than tapering. Bamboos include some of the plants in the world, due to a unique rhizome-dependent system. Certain species of bamboo can grow 91 cm within a 24-hour period, giant bamboos are the largest members of the grass family. Bamboos are of economic and cultural significance in South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, being used for building materials, as a food source. Bamboo has a higher compressive strength than wood, brick, or concrete. The word bamboo comes from the Kannada term bambu, which was introduced to English through Indonesian, the subfamily in its current sense belongs to the BOP clade of grasses, where it is sister to the Pooideae. The woody bamboos do not form a group, instead. Altogether, more than 1,400 species are placed in 115 genera, most bamboo are native to warm and moist tropical and warm temperate climates. However, many species are found in climates, from hot tropical regions to cool mountainous regions. In the Asia-Pacific region they occur across East Asia, from 50°N latitude in Sakhalin south to Northern Australia, and west to India, China, Japan, Korea, India, and Australia, all have several endemic populations. They also occur in numbers in sub-Saharan Africa, confined to tropical areas, from southern Senegal in the north to southern Mozambique. Bamboo is also native through Central America and Mexico, northward into the Southeastern United States, canada and continental Europe is not known to have any native species of bamboo. Recently, some attempts have been made to grow bamboo on a basis in the Great Lakes region of east-central Africa. In the United States, several companies are growing, harvesting, bamboos include some of the fastest-growing plants on Earth, with reported growth rates up to 91 cm in 24 hours. Primarily growing in regions of warmer climates during the late Cretaceous period, some of the largest timber bamboo can grow over 30 m tall, and be as large as 25–30 cm in diameter. However, the range for mature bamboo is species-dependent, with the smallest bamboos reaching only several inches high at maturity. A typical height range that would cover many of the common bamboos grown in the United States is 4. 6–12 m, depending on species
2.
Western Ghats
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Western Ghats மேற்கு தொடர்ச்சி மலை is a mountain range that runs parallel to the western coast of the Indian peninsula, located entirely in India. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is one of the eight hottest hot-spots of biological diversity in the world and it is sometimes called the Great Escarpment of India. The range runs north to south along the edge of the Deccan Plateau. These hills cover 160,000 km2 and form the catchment area for complex riverine drainage systems that drain almost 40% of India, the Western Ghats block southwest monsoon winds from reaching the Deccan Plateau. The average elevation is around 1,200 m, at least 325 globally threatened species occur in the Western Ghats. The Western Ghats are the mountainous faulted and eroded edge of the Deccan Plateau, geologic evidence indicates that they were formed during the break-up of the supercontinent of Gondwana some 150 million years ago. Geophysical evidence indicates that the west coast of India came into being somewhere around 100 to 80 mya after it broke away from Madagascar, after the break-up, the western coast of India would have appeared as an abrupt cliff some 1,000 m in elevation. Basalt is the predominant rock found in the reaching a thickness of 3 km. Other rock types found are charnockites, granite gneiss, khondalites, leptynites, metamorphic gneisses with detached occurrences of limestone, iron ore. Residual laterite and bauxite ores are found in the southern hills. The Western Ghats extend from the Satpura Range in the north and it traverses south past the states of Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka and Kerala. Major gaps in the range are the Goa Gap, between the Maharashtra and Karnataka sections, and the Palghat Gap on the Tamil Nadu and Kerala border between the Nilgiri Hills and the Anaimalai Hills. The mountains intercept the rain-bearing westerly monsoon winds, and are consequently an area of high rainfall, particularly on their western side. The northern portion of the coastal plain between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea is known as the Konkan, the central portion is called Kanara. The foothill region east of the Ghats in Maharashtra is known as Desh, the range is known as Sahyadri in Maharashtra and Karnataka. The Western Ghats meets the Eastern Ghats at Nilgiris in northwestern Tamil Nadu, Nilgiris connects Biligiriranga Hills in southeastern Karnataka with the Shevaroys and Tirumala hills. In the southern part of the range is Anamudi, the highest peak in Western Ghats, following is a list of some of the highest peaks of the Western Ghats, The Western Ghats form one of the four watersheds of India, feeding the perennial rivers of India. The major river systems originating in the Western Ghats include Godavari, Kaveri, Krishna, Thamiraparani, majority of streams draining the Western Ghats join these rivers and carry large volume of water during the monsoon months
3.
India
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India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and it is bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast. It shares land borders with Pakistan to the west, China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the northeast, in the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives. Indias Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a border with Thailand. The Indian subcontinent was home to the urban Indus Valley Civilisation of the 3rd millennium BCE, in the following millennium, the oldest scriptures associated with Hinduism began to be composed. Social stratification, based on caste, emerged in the first millennium BCE, early political consolidations took place under the Maurya and Gupta empires, the later peninsular Middle Kingdoms influenced cultures as far as southeast Asia. In the medieval era, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam arrived, much of the north fell to the Delhi sultanate, the south was united under the Vijayanagara Empire. The economy expanded in the 17th century in the Mughal empire, in the mid-18th century, the subcontinent came under British East India Company rule, and in the mid-19th under British crown rule. A nationalist movement emerged in the late 19th century, which later, under Mahatma Gandhi, was noted for nonviolent resistance, in 2015, the Indian economy was the worlds seventh largest by nominal GDP and third largest by purchasing power parity. Following market-based economic reforms in 1991, India became one of the major economies and is considered a newly industrialised country. However, it continues to face the challenges of poverty, corruption, malnutrition, a nuclear weapons state and regional power, it has the third largest standing army in the world and ranks sixth in military expenditure among nations. India is a constitutional republic governed under a parliamentary system. It is a pluralistic, multilingual and multi-ethnic society and is home to a diversity of wildlife in a variety of protected habitats. The name India is derived from Indus, which originates from the Old Persian word Hindu, the latter term stems from the Sanskrit word Sindhu, which was the historical local appellation for the Indus River. The ancient Greeks referred to the Indians as Indoi, which translates as The people of the Indus, the geographical term Bharat, which is recognised by the Constitution of India as an official name for the country, is used by many Indian languages in its variations. Scholars believe it to be named after the Vedic tribe of Bharatas in the second millennium B. C. E and it is also traditionally associated with the rule of the legendary emperor Bharata. Gaṇarājya is the Sanskrit/Hindi term for republic dating back to the ancient times, hindustan is a Persian name for India dating back to the 3rd century B. C. E. It was introduced into India by the Mughals and widely used since then and its meaning varied, referring to a region that encompassed northern India and Pakistan or India in its entirety
4.
Biology
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Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, evolution, distribution, identification and taxonomy. Modern biology is a vast and eclectic field, composed of branches and subdisciplines. However, despite the broad scope of biology, there are certain unifying concepts within it that consolidate it into single, coherent field. In general, biology recognizes the cell as the unit of life, genes as the basic unit of heredity. It is also understood today that all organisms survive by consuming and transforming energy and by regulating their internal environment to maintain a stable, the term biology is derived from the Greek word βίος, bios, life and the suffix -λογία, -logia, study of. The Latin-language form of the term first appeared in 1736 when Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus used biologi in his Bibliotheca botanica, the first German use, Biologie, was in a 1771 translation of Linnaeus work. In 1797, Theodor Georg August Roose used the term in the preface of a book, karl Friedrich Burdach used the term in 1800 in a more restricted sense of the study of human beings from a morphological, physiological and psychological perspective. The science that concerns itself with these objects we will indicate by the biology or the doctrine of life. Although modern biology is a recent development, sciences related to. Natural philosophy was studied as early as the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indian subcontinent, however, the origins of modern biology and its approach to the study of nature are most often traced back to ancient Greece. While the formal study of medicine back to Hippocrates, it was Aristotle who contributed most extensively to the development of biology. Especially important are his History of Animals and other works where he showed naturalist leanings, and later more empirical works that focused on biological causation and the diversity of life. Aristotles successor at the Lyceum, Theophrastus, wrote a series of books on botany that survived as the most important contribution of antiquity to the plant sciences, even into the Middle Ages. Scholars of the medieval Islamic world who wrote on biology included al-Jahiz, Al-Dīnawarī, who wrote on botany, biology began to quickly develop and grow with Anton van Leeuwenhoeks dramatic improvement of the microscope. It was then that scholars discovered spermatozoa, bacteria, infusoria, investigations by Jan Swammerdam led to new interest in entomology and helped to develop the basic techniques of microscopic dissection and staining. Advances in microscopy also had a impact on biological thinking. In the early 19th century, a number of biologists pointed to the importance of the cell. Thanks to the work of Robert Remak and Rudolf Virchow, however, meanwhile, taxonomy and classification became the focus of natural historians
5.
Plant community
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The components of each plant community are influenced by soil type, topography, climate and human disturbance. In many cases there are several soil types within a given phytocoenosis, a plant community can be described floristically and/or physiognomically. For example, a forest includes the overstory, or upper layer of the canopy, as well as the understory, further subdivided into the shrub layer, herbaceous layer. In some cases of complex forests there is also a well-defined lower tree layer, a plant community can be rare even if none of the major species defining it are rare. This is because it is the association of species and relationship to their environment that may be rare, an example is the Sycamore Alluvial Woodland in California dominated by the California sycamore Platanus racemosa. The community is rare, being localized to an area of California and existing nowhere else. An example is a grassland on the northern Caucasus Steppes, where common grass species found are Festuca sulcata, a common sedge in this grassland phytocoenosis is Carex shreberi. Other representative forbs occurring in these grasslands are Artemisia austriaca. An example of a three tiered plant community is in Central Westland of South Island, New Zealand and these forests are the most extensive continuous reaches of podocarp/broadleaf forests in that country. The overstory includes miro, rimu and mountain totara, community Association size-asymmetric competition Ecosystem Habitat Phytosociology Salt Marsh Stand level modelling Jean-Michel Gobat, Michel Aragno, Willy Matthey and V. A. K. Sarma. The living soil C. Michael Hogan, crown Fern, Blechnum discolor, Globaltwitcher. com, ed. N. Stromberg J. M. Suttie, Stephen G. Reynolds and Caterina Batello. Grasslands of the world, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,514 pages
6.
Crop
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A crop is any cultivated plant, fungus, or alga that is harvested for food, clothing, livestock, fodder, biofuel, medicine, or other uses. In contrast, animals that are raised by humans are called livestock, microbes, such as bacteria or viruses, are referred to as cultures. Microbes are not typically grown for food, but are used to alter food. For example, bacteria are used to ferment milk to produce yogurt, major crops include sugarcane, pumpkin, maize, wheat, rice, cassava, soybeans, hay, potatoes, and cotton. Sleper, David A. Poehlman, John M. Breeding Field Crops
7.
Crown (botany)
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The crown of a plant refers to the totality of an individual plants aboveground parts, including stems, leaves, and reproductive structures. A plant community consists of one or more plant crowns growing in a given area. The crown of a plant is the branches, leaves. Shapes of crowns are highly variable, the major types for trees are the excurrent branching habit resulting in conoid shapes and decurrent branching habit, resulting in round shapes. Crowns are also characterized by their width, depth, surface area, volume, measurements of crowns are important in quantifying and qualifying plant health, growth stage, and efficiency. These functions are performed by the leaves, branches of the crown provide mechanical support to distribute the leaves efficiently and serve as conduits for resources to perform these functions. Trees can be described as fitting different crown classes, kraft designated these social classes based on temperate and boreal forests in Mitteleuropa, so they do not necessarily work with every forest type in the world. Apical dominance Canopy Canopy Diameter at breast height Fruit tree forms Growth habit Habit Pruning Stratification Tree crown measurement Understory Tree crown Kozlowski, T. Kramer, P. Pallardy, the physiological ecology of woody plants
8.
Forest ecology
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Forest ecology is the scientific study of the interrelated patterns, processes, flora, fauna and ecosystems in forests. The management of forests is known as forestry, silviculture, a forest ecosystem is a natural woodland unit consisting of all plants, animals and micro-organisms in that area functioning together with all of the non-living physical factors of the environment. The forest ecosystem is very important, Forest ecology is one branch of a biotically-oriented classification of types of ecological study. Thus, forests are studied at a number of organizational levels, however, as the term forest connotes an area inhabited by more than one organism, forest ecology most often concentrates on the level of the population, community or ecosystem. Thus, forest ecology is a diverse and important branch of ecological study. Forest ecology studies share characteristics and methodological approaches with other areas of plant ecology. However, the presence of trees makes forest ecosystems and their unique in numerous ways. Since trees can grow larger than other plant life-forms, there is the potential for a variety of forest structures. In addition, an important proportion of a forest ecosystems biomass is often underground, where soil structure, water quality and quantity, thus, forests are often highly heterogeneous environments compared to other terrestrial plant communities. This heterogeneity in turn can enable great biodiversity of species of plants and animals. It also affects the design of forest inventory sampling strategies, the results of which are used in ecological studies. For example, the wild turkey thrives when uneven heights and canopy variations exist, forests accumulate large amounts of standing biomass, and many are capable of accumulating it at high rates, i. e. they are highly productive. Such high levels of biomass and tall vertical structures represent large stores of energy that can be converted to kinetic energy under the right circumstances. Two such conversions of great importance are fires and treefalls, both of which alter the biota and the physical environment where they occur. Trees growing in arid and/or cold environments do so especially slowly, thus, tree trunks and branches can remain on the forest floor for long periods, affecting such things as wildlife habitat, fire behavior, and tree regeneration processes. Lastly, forest trees store large amounts of water because of their large size and they are therefore important regulators of hydrological processes, especially those involving groundwater hydrology and local evaporation and rainfall/snowfall patterns. Thus, forest ecological studies are sometimes closely aligned with meteorological and hydrological studies in regional ecosystem or resource planning studies, perhaps more importantly the duff or leaf litter can form a major repository of water storage. When this litter is removed or compacted, erosion and flooding are exacerbated as well as deprivation of dry season water for forest organisms
9.
Habitat
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A habitat is an ecological or environmental area that is inhabited by a particular species of animal, plant, or other type of organism. The term typically refers to the zone in which the organism lives and it is the natural environment in which an organism lives, or the physical environment that surrounds a species population. Every organism has certain habitat needs for the conditions in which it will thrive, habitat types include polar, temperate, subtropical and tropical. The terrestrial vegetation type may be forest, steppe, grassland, the word habitat has been in use since about 1755 and derives from the Latin third-person singular present indicative of habitāre, to inhabit, from habēre, to have or to hold. Habitat can be defined as the environment of an organism. It is similar in meaning to a biotope, an area of environmental conditions associated with a particular community of plants. Generally speaking, animal communities are reliant on specific types of plant communities, some plants and animals are generalists, and their habitat requirements are met in a wide range of locations. The small white butterfly for example is found on all the continents of the world apart from Antarctica and its larvae feed on a wide range of Brassicas and various other plant species, and it thrives in any open location with diverse plant associations. Disturbance is important in the creation of biodiverse habitats, in the absence of disturbance, a climax vegetation cover develops that prevents the establishment of other species. Lightning strikes and toppled trees in tropical forests allow species richness to be maintained as pioneering species move in to fill the gaps created. Similarly coastal habitats can become dominated by kelp until the seabed is disturbed by a storm, another cause of disturbance is when an area may be overwhelmed by an invasive introduced species which is not kept under control by natural enemies in its new habitat. Terrestrial habitat types include forests, grasslands, wetlands and deserts, within these broad biomes are more specific habitats with varying climate types, temperature regimes, soils, altitudes and vegetation types. Many of these habitats grade into each other and each one has its own communities of plants. A habitat may suit a particular species well, but its presence or absence at any particular location depends to some extent on chance, on its dispersal abilities, freshwater habitats include rivers, streams, lakes, ponds, marshes and bogs. Although some organisms are found across most of these habitats, the majority have more specific requirements, similarly, aquatic plants can be floating, semi-submerged, submerged or grow in permanently or temporarily saturated soils besides bodies of water. Marine habitats include brackish water, estuaries, bays, the sea, the intertidal zone. Further variations include rock pools, sand banks, mudflats, brackish lagoons, sandy and pebbly beaches, the benthic zone or seabed provides a home for both static organisms, anchored to the substrate, and for a large range of organisms crawling on or burrowing into the surface. A desert is not the kind of habitat that favours the presence of amphibians, with their requirement for water to keep their skins moist, nevertheless, some frogs live in deserts, creating moist habitats underground and hibernating while conditions are adverse
10.
Epiphyte
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An epiphyte is a plant that grows harmlessly upon another plant and derives its moisture and nutrients from the air, rain, and sometimes from debris accumulating around it. Epiphytes differ from parasites in that epiphytes grow on plants for physical support. An epiphytic organism that is not a plant is called an epibiont, epiphytes are usually found in the temperate zone or in the tropics. Epiphyte species make good houseplants due to their water and soil requirements. Epiphytes provide a rich and diverse habitat for other organisms including animals, fungi, bacteria, epiphyte is one of the subdivisions of the Raunkiær system. The term epiphytic derives from the Greek epi- and phyton, epiphytic plants are sometimes called air plants because they do not root in soil. However, there are aquatic species of algae, including seaweeds. The best-known epiphytic plants include mosses, orchids, and bromeliads such as Spanish moss, 89% of epiphyte species are flowering plants. The second largest group are the ferns, with about 2800 species. In fact, about one third of all ferns are epiphytes, the third largest group is clubmosses, with 190 species, followed by a handful of species in each of the spikemosses, other ferns, Gnetales, and cycads. Epiphytic organisms usually derive only physical support and not nutrition from their host, parasitic and semiparasitic plants growing on other plants are not true epiphytes, but are still epiphytic in habit. Some epiphytic plants are trees that begin their lives high in the forest canopy. Over decades they send roots down the trunk of a host tree eventually overpowering and replacing it, the strangler fig and the northern rātā of New Zealand are examples of this. Epiphytes that end up as free standing trees are also called hemiepiphytes, epiphytic plants use photosynthesis for energy and obtain moisture from the air or from dampness on the surface of their hosts. Roots may develop primarily for attachment, and specialized structures may be used to collect or hold moisture, the first important monograph on epiphytic plant ecology was written by A. F. W. Assemblages of large epiphytes occur most abundantly in moist tropical forests, in Europe there are no dedicated epiphytic plants using roots, but rich assemblages of mosses and lichens grow on trees in damp areas, and the common polypody fern grows epiphytically along branches. Rarely, grass, small bushes or small trees may grow in suspended soils up trees, epiphytic plants attached to their hosts high in the canopy have an advantage over herbs restricted to the ground where there is less light and herbivores may be more active. Epiphytic plants are important to certain animals that may live in their water reservoirs, such as some types of frogs
