Systematics of plants, lichens and algae

Systematics is the science of biodiversity. An important part of our work is to describe and give name to new organisms as they are discovered. This research is summarized in floras and taxonomic revisions of particular groups, a literature indispensible for correct identification of material in other biological disciplines and applied sciences including horticulture, plant breeding and conservation. This part of systematics, taxonomy, is dependent on museums for archiving collections and for access to reference material. Systematists also reconstruct phylogenies (a phylogeny is the evolutionary history of a group), and describe how Earth's biodiversity has evolved. We also study evolutionary processes in order to understand how new species arise. The science of systematics is thus tightly linked to other disciplines such as genetics, ecology and biogeography.

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Last modified15 Dec 2011

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