Diversity in the living world

There is large variety of living organisms like potted plants, insects, birds, pets or other animals and plants.

There are also several organisms that cannot be seen with naked eye but they are all around us.

As increase the area of observations than the range and variety of organisms would increase.

In a dense forest probably much greater number and kinds of living organisms are found.

Each different kind of plant, animal or organism that seen, represents a species.

The number of species that are known and described around 1.8 million.

This refers to biodiversity and new organisms are continuously being identified.

The plants and animals are known by their local names and vary from place to place even within a country.

Hence, there is a need to standardise the naming of living organismssuch that a particular organism is known by the same name all over the world.

This process is called nomenclature.

In order to facilitate the study, number of scientists have established procedures to assign a scientific name to each known organism. This is acceptable to biologists all over the world.

For plants, scientific names are based on agreed principles and criteria, which are provided in International Code for Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN).

For animals, Animal taxonomists have evolved International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN).

The scientific names ensure that each organism has only one name.

Description of any organism should enable the people to arrive at the same name.

This system of providing a name with two components is called Binomial nomenclature.

The naming system given by Carolus Linnaeus is being practised by biologists all over the world.

This naming system using a two word format was found convenient.

Let us take the example of mango to understand the way of providing scientific names better.

The scientific name of mango is written as Mangifera indica. Let us see how it is a binomial name.

In this name Mangifera represents the genus while indica is a particular species, or a specific epithet.

Other universal rules of nomenclature are as follows:

1. Biological names are generally in Latin and written in italics.

They are Latinised or derived from Latin irrespective of their origin.

2. The first word in a biological name represents the genus while the second component denotes the specific epithet.

3. Both the words in a biological name, when handwritten, are separately underlined, or printed in italics to indicate their Latin origin.

4. The first word denoting the genus starts with a capital letter while the specific epithet starts with a small letter.

It can be illustrated with the example of Mangifera indica.

Hence, characterisation, identification, classification and nomenclature are the processes that are basic to taxonomy..

Levels of biodiversity

There are three levels of biodiversity as follows:

Genetic,

Species

Ecosystem diversity