Botany
From RationalWiki
Botany is the science of plants, and as such a subdiscipline of biology.
[edit] History of botany
Plants have always been of prime importance to humans, primarily as food, but also as pasture for lifestock, building material, fuel and herbal medicines (especially when nothing else was available). It is therefore not surprising that humans have accumulated vast amounts of relevant knowledge even before beginning to study them consciously and systematically. As an example, the ancient Babylonians already knew the benefits of hand pollination of date palms, long before plant sexuality was actually understood.
Major steps of progress in scholarly and protoscientific work on plants in western civilization include the botanical writings of Theophrastus, Aristotle and Dioscorides in antiquity, followed by medieval herbals composed as lists of useful plants. The modern science of botany began to develop out of medicine and pharmacology; in fact, many old European botanical gardens started as herb gardens of medical professors. In 1753, Carl Linnaeus introduced the binary names that characterize modern taxonomy with his book Species Plantarum. A considerable but often neglected breakthrough was the explanation of animal pollination in plants by Christian K. Sprengel, published in 1793. The 19th century saw a rapid increase in the number of known plant species as more and more excursions into tropical countries or colonies were undertaken. Many species could for the first time be cultivated and studied in greenhouses of temperate Europe and North America thanks to the invention of containers that allowed them to survive transport. Gregor Mendel, one of the fathers of genetics, at the same time conducted his influential research on selected species of plants, especially peas.
In the last few decades, molecular and laboratory methods have become increasingly important in botany. Evolutionary biology and systematics of plants rely increasingly on molecular data to reconstruct phylogenies and resolve the relationships between species. Intensive research has been conducted on a few model species to get a better understanding of genetic and developmental processes in plants, especially on Arabidopsis thaliana, a cabbage relative comparable in its scientific importance to the zoologist's fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Other recent additions to the research interests of botanists are biotechnology, the study of invasive organisms and the impact of global change on plant communities.
[edit] Subfields
Just as with animals in zoology, researchers can specialize on extremely different aspects of plants. Consequently, the field is very heterogeneous, including subfields such as:
- Plant taxonomy
- Plant systematics
- Plant ecology
- Anatomy and morphology
- Cell biology
- Plant physiology
- Plant biochemistry
- Ethnobotany, documenting the traditional uses and cultural value of plants
Other subfields are specific to plants, as no comparable features exist in other groups of organisms:
- Dendrochronology examines the growth rings in the wood of trees or wooden beams in ancient builings, to make inferences about the climate of up to a few thousand years ago, and to date buildings.
- Palynology is the science of pollen grains, mostly dealing with drill core samples from sea or swamp sediments to reconstruct the vegetation of up to several hundred thousand years ago.
- Pollination biology deals with the sexuality of flowering plants and their coevolution and interactions with pollinating agents.
Some researchers specialize on taxonomic or ecological subgroups of the plant kingdom:
- Dendrology, the science of trees
- Bryology, the science of mosses, liverworts and hornworts
- Lichenology, the science of lichens
- Phycology, the science of algae
- Mycology, the science of fungi and molds, is variously seen as a part of either botany or microbiology in different universities
The scope of some subfields of botany smoothly intergrades with those of other fields of science, especially forestry, agronomy, phytopathology / phytomedicine and landscape geography.
