Category Environtal Studies

Over thousands of years, human beings have found many uses for plants. Some of the most common ones are shown here.

Plants also provide us with fibres for making cloth, rope, paper etc. There are numerous dyes obtained from plants with which to colour our fabrics. Many plants have oil-rich seeds and these oils can be extracted when they have a variety of uses. Many of them are edible and they can also be used as lubricants, fuel, for lighting, in paints and varnishes, as a wood preservative, waterproofing etc.

The articles below highlight some of these uses.

• Alternative Lighting: Plant Oils Waxes
• Fibre Plants
• Soap Plants
• Vegetable Oil

Building Materials

• Insulation: Providing insulation against extremes of temperature, sound or electricity.
• Pipes: For carrying water etc.
• Pitch: Used for waterproofing, in paints etc.
• Plaster: Used for covering walls.
• Roofing: Used to give a waterproof roof to buildings. See also Thatching.
• Thatching Used for making thatched roofs.

Clothing
 

• Buttons: Plants that can be used as buttons. Not including making buttons from wood.
• Darning ball 
• Fibre: Used for making cloth, rope, paper etc.
• Latex: A source of rubber.
• Leather: Substitutes, that is.
• Needles: Used for sewing, darning etc.
• Pins: Used as needles and pins in sewing etc. Also used to lance boils, extract splinters from the skin etc.
• Raffia: A substitute for that material.
• Starch: Used as a fabric stiffener.
• Stuffing: Used in making soft toys, mattresses, pillows etc.
• Tannin: An astringent substance obtained from plants, it is used medicinally, as a dye and mordant, stabilizer in pesticide etc.
• Weaving: Items such as grass and palm leaves that are woven together for making mats, baskets etc. See also Basket making and Fibre.

Dyes, paints, inks and paper

• Blotting paper: Plant that can be used to make blotting paper.
• Dye: Plants that provide dyes.
• Ink: Plants that can be used as an ink.
• Mordant: Used for making a dye more permanent, it also affects the colour of the dye.
• Paint: Plants used directly as paint. Does not include oil plants and dyes that can be used as ingredients in paints.
• Paper: Related to the entry for Fibre, these plants have been specifically mentioned for paper making.
• Pencil: A couple of plants especially mentioned for making the tubes that pencil leads fit into.
• Size: Used on materials, paper etc to give a surface that will take ink, dyes etc. 

A Plant’s leaves contain a green substance called chlorophyll. The chlorophyll energy enables chemical reactions to take place. These use energy from the Sun and carbon dioxide gas from the air to make food for the plant to live and grow. As photosynthesis happens, oxygen is given off into the air.

Green plants use photosynthesis to create energy from carbon dioxide and sunlight. This energy, in the form of glucose, is used by the plant to grow and fuel the necessary reproductive activities of the plant. Excess glucose is stored in the leaves, stem and roots of the plant. The stored glucose provides food for higher organisms that eat the plants. A byproduct of the process of photosynthesis is oxygen, which is released into the atmosphere in exchange for the carbon dioxide used during the chemical reaction of photosynthesis.

Photosynthesis in plants requires a combination of carbon dioxide, water and light energy. The light energy used in photosynthesis is typically derived from the sun but is also effective when provided by artificial lighting. The leaves of a plant have the primary burden of creating food for the plant through the process of photosynthesis. The leaves of a plant are spread flat to catch as many of the sun’s rays as possible, in order to facilitate the absorption of light energy.

Within the leaves are mesophyll cells which contain chloroplasts. Photosynthesis occurs within these structures, which contain the substance chlorophyll. Chlorophyll, along with other pigments present in the chloroplast, absorbs the light energy of all colors but green for use in the photosynthesis process. The remaining green light is reflected back off of the plant, resulting in green color characteristic of a plant using photosynthesis for energy. Once the light has been absorbed, it must be stored as ATP, or adenosine triphosphate, in order to be used in the next phase of photosynthesis.

During the final stage of photosynthesis, which is considered to be light-independent, carbon dioxide is converted into glucose. This chemical change requires the ATP that was stored in the first part of the photosynthesis cycle. The ATP is combined with carbon dioxide in what is known as the Calvin cycle. This combination creates a compound called glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate, which combines with another glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate compound as it is produced, to produce one glucose molecule.

Like animals, plants need food for energy to survive and grow, but while animals can move about to catch their food or find new areas of vegetation, plants are usually rooted to one spot. But plants can do something that no animal can do. They can make energy from sunlight. This process is called photosynthesis. As well as light, plants also need water and nutrients.

          A plant may not look lively and active. But inside its millions of microscopic cells, thousands of chemical changes take place as part of the plant’s life processes. Like an animal’s body, a plant’s body has many specialized parts for different jobs. The roots take in water, minerals, salts and other substances from the soil in which the plant grows. The stiff stem holds the main parts of the plant above the surface, away from animals on the ground that might eat it, and above other plants so that the leaves can catch more sunlight. 

          A plant’s leaves are “light-powered food factories”. They are broad and flat so that as much light as possible falls on them. A green substance called chlorophyll in the leaves catches or absorbs the energy in light. It uses this energy to make a chemical reaction. Water, taken up from the soil, and carbon dioxide, taken in from the air, join together to form sugar, which contains lots of energy in chemical form. The plant then uses the sugar to power its life activities. The process is called photosynthesis —a word meaning “making with light”.

          The carbon dioxide for photosynthesis comes from the air. It seeps into the leaf through tiny holes in its lower surface, known as stomata. In addition to sugar, photosynthesis also produces oxygen, which seeps out into the air. Living things including ourselves need oxygen to survive. Plants help to top up its level in the air.

The system of classifying living things was invented by a Swedish botanist called Carolos Linnaeus (1707-78). Latin was traditionally the language used by scholars, so the classifications have Latin names. This also means that living things can be identified by scientists in every country, no matter what the local name for a species might be.

Most plants and animals have popular names that can vary from place to place. So a name needed to be given that would be recognized everywhere. It was decided so use Latin for the scientific names, as it was the language use centuries ago by learned people. Carl Linnaeus was the man who established the modern scientific method for naming plants and animals. Scientific names are in two parts. The first part is the generic name, which describes a group of related living things. The second name is the specific name, which applies only to that living thing. This specific name may describe the living thing, or it could include the name of the person who discovered it.

Linnaeus and other scientists used Latin because it was a dead language. No people or nation uses it as an official language. Many other languages may have Latin bases but don’t use all of it. So he would not insult any country when he began to name organisms although you will see that he did one time to a person he did not like. Before Linnaeus, species naming practices varied. He did study to be a doctor of medicine but was attracted to botany as many medicines at the time were from plants.

Many biologists gave the species they described long, unwieldy Latin names, which could be altered at will; a scientist comparing two descriptions of species might not be able to tell which organisms were being referred to. For instance, the common wild briar rose was referred to by different botanists as Rosa sylvestris inodora seu canina and as Rosa sylvestris alba cum rubore, folio glabro. The need for a workable naming system was made even greater by the huge number of plants and animals that were being brought back to Europe from Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

After experimenting with various alternatives, Linnaeus simplified naming immensely by designating one Latin name to indicate the genus, and one as a “shorthand” name for the species. The two names make up the binomial (“two names”) species name. The sexual basis of Linnaeus’s plant classification was controversial in its day; although easy to learn and use, it clearly did not give good results in many cases.

Some critics also attacked it for its sexually explicit nature: one opponent, botanist Johann Siegesbeck, called it “loathsome harlotry”. (Linnaeus had his revenge, however; he named a small, useless European weed Siegesbeckia.)

The class of insects is the largest class of living things, containing over one million different species.

In terms of numbers of species, insects certainly represent the largest percentage of the world’s organisms. There are more than 1 million species of insects that have been documented and studied by scientists. And the total number of documented species of living organisms at the present time is probably about 2.5 million. So insects represent about 40% of all known living species!

But that’s not the end of the story. Scientists estimate that there may actually be somewhere between 10 and 30 million species of insects inhabiting our planet. So insects as a percentage of organisms might actually be greater than we currently estimate.

If we look at your question from the point of view of numbers of individuals, the answers is almost certainly insects as well. In fact, the answer may be ants. There are 14,000 known species of ants. And they all form ant colonies. In some species of ants, those colonies may be extremely large. One colony may contain many tens of thousands of individuals! Some scientists have made credible calculations suggesting that the weight of all ants is greater than that of all humans.

Lions are social animals that hunt and live in groups called prides. The males have little parental investment toward the cubs, and males may even commit infanticide against suckling cubs that are not their own. There is usually fierce competition for food because successful hunts are rare and members of the pride tend to gorge themselves when food is available. The ruling male lion will eat his fill, and then the other males, females, and finally the cubs. The competition for food contributes to the high mortality rate of the cubs.

The lion (Panthera leo) is the largest wild cat in Africa, yet populations of the ‘king of the jungle’ have dramatically declined by nearly half in just two decades. Historically lions occurred in sub-Saharan Africa as well as from northern Africa into southwest Asia and Europe. However only a remnant population remains in India and the present day populations only occur in sub-Saharan Africa.

Unique among all wild cats, lions have a social structure as opposed to a solitary lifestyle; and males differ from females with large manes, whereas males and females of other wild cats look very similar.

The scientific name for lion is Panthera leo which is also known as the lion binomial name, lion species name, lion latin name, lion biological name and lion zoological name. Some call it the lion botanical name however that term is applicable to the plant kingdom (botany) and not the animal kingdom (zoology).

Lions belong to the big cat genus Panthera and the full taxonomy or scientific classification of the lion species (Panthera leo) is as follows:

Lions belong to the:

Animal (Animalia) kingdom

Chordate (Chordata) phylum

Mammal (Mammalia) class

Carnivore (Carnivora) order

Cat (Felidae) family

Big cat (Panthera) genus

Lion (leo) species

The scientific name for lions is Panthera leo, the last two divisions.