1.
Gippsland
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Gippsland is an economic rural region of Victoria, Australia, located in the south-eastern part of that state. Gippsland is generally broken down into the East Gippsland, South Gippsland, West Gippsland, the area was originally inhabited by Indigenous Australians of the Gunai nation and part of West Gippsland by the Bunurong nation. Before permanent European settlement, the area was visited by sealers and wattle bark gatherers and his business partner Robert Massie joined him in 1837. Both had worked for the Van Diemens Land Company at Circular Head, samuels brothers Hugh and Thomas arrived at Bass shortly after, where they established a successful farming venture. Further European settlement followed two separate expeditions to the area, angus McMillan led the first European expedition between 1839 and 1840, naming the area Caledonia Australis. Following these expeditions, the area was officially named Gippsland, a chosen by Strzelecki in honour of the New South Wales Governor, George Gipps. The township of Bass was surveyed and settled in the early 1860s, Gippsland is traditionally subdivided into four or five main sub–regions or districts, West Gippsland South Gippsland the Latrobe Valley East Gippsland. Sometimes a fifth region, Central Gippsland, is added to refer to the zone between the Gippsland Lakes and Yarram. The climate of Gippsland is temperate and generally humid, except in the region around Sale. In the Strzelecki Ranges annual rainfall can be as high as 1,500 millimetres, in lower levels east of the Snowy River, mean annual rainfall is typically about 900–950 millimetres and less variable than in the coastal districts of New South Wales. Mean maximum temperatures in lower areas range from 24 °C in January to 15 °C in July, in the highlands of the Baw Baw Plateau and the remote Errinundra Plateau, temperatures range from a maximum of 18 °C to a minimum of 8 °C. However, in winter, mean minima in these areas can be as low as −4 °C, the soils in Gippsland are generally very infertile, being profoundly deficient in nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and calcium. Apart from frequently flooded areas, they are classed as Spodosols, Psamments, consequently, heavy fertilisation is required for agriculture or pastoral development. Despite this, parts of Gippsland have become highly productive dairying and vegetable-growing regions, a few alluvial soils have much better native fertility, and these have always been intensively cultivated. In the extreme northeast is a section of the Monaro Tableland used for grazing beef cattle. Gippsland possesses very few deposits of metallic minerals, however, the deep underground gold mines operated at Walhalla for a fifty-year period between 1863-1913. Like the rest of Australia, the seas around Gippsland are of low productivity as there is no upwelling due to the warm currents in the Tasman Sea. Nonetheless, towns such as Marlo and Mallacoota depended for a time on the fishing of abalone, whose shells could fetch very high prices because of their use for pearls
2.
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
3.
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
4.
Cyatheales
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The order Cyatheales, which includes the tree ferns, is a taxonomic division of the fern class, Polypodiopsida. No clear morphological features characterize all of the Cyatheales, but DNA sequence data indicate the order is monophyletic, some species in the Cyatheales have tree-like growth forms, but others have rhizomes. Some species have scales on the stems and leaves, while others have hairs, however, most plants in the Cyatheales are tree ferns and have trunk-like stems up to 10 metres tall. It is unclear how many times the form has evolved. In general, any fern that grows with a trunk elevating the fronds above ground level can be called a tree fern, however, the plants formally known as tree ferns comprise a group of large ferns belonging to the families Dicksoniaceae and Cyatheaceae in the order Cyatheales. Like all ferns, tree ferns reproduce by means of spores developed in sporangia on the undersides of the fronds, the fronds of tree ferns are usually very large and multiple-pinnated, but at least one type has entire fronds. The fronds of tree ferns also exhibit circinate vernation, meaning the young emerge in coils that uncurl as they grow. Unlike flowering plants, tree ferns do not form new tissue in their trunk as they grow. Rather, the trunk is supported by a mass of roots that expands as the tree fern grows. Some genera — for example Dicksonia and Cibotium, and some Cyathea — can be transplanted by severing the top portion from the rest of the trunk, if the transplanted top part is kept moist it will regrow a new root system over the next year. The success rate of transplantation increases if the roots are dug up intact, if the crown of the Tasmanian tree fern Dicksonia antarctica is damaged, it will die because all new growth occurs there. But other clump-forming tree fern species, such as D. squarrosa and D. youngiae, Tree ferns often fall over in the wild, yet manage to reroot from this new prostrate position and begin new vertical growth. The number of tree species is likely to be around a thousand. While many ferns are able to achieve a widespread distribution because of their spore reproduction and this makes their species much more susceptible to the effects of local deforestation. Why species are not more widespread is unknown, especially considering they have sufficient height to have a chance of getting spores into the wind stream. Where feral pigs are a problem, as in some Hawaiian rainforests, they knock over tree ferns to root out the starchy pith. Outside of the Cyatheales a few ferns in other groups could be considered tree ferns, a few species in the genera Blechnum, Leptopteris, Sadleria and Todea could also be considered tree ferns in a liberal interpretation of the term. In the molecular phylogenetic classification of Smith et al. in 2006, eight families, Thyrsopteridaceae, Loxsomataceae, Culcitaceae, Plagiogyriaceae, Cibotiaceae, Cyatheaceae, Dicksoniaceae, and Metaxyaceae, were recognized
5.
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
