What is Botany?
-is a branch of biology,that deals with different kind or species of plant.
-they covers wide range of scientific disciplines concerned with plants.
-it includes Growth, Structures, Reproduction, Metabolism, development, disease.
Scope and Importance of Botany?
1.Human Nutrition
- all of us are humans, we are all consumers, a tertiary consumers, otherwise we eat both plants and animals(omnivores),thus we need to eat nutritious food, either directly from staple foods and other fruit and vegetables, or indirectly throughlivestock or other animals, which rely on plants for their nutrition.Plants are the fundamental base of nearly all food chainsbecause they use the energy from the sun and nutrients from the soil and atmosphere, converting them into a form that can be consumed and utilized by animals; this is what ecologists call the first trophic level.
2.Fundamental Life Process
-Plants are convenient organisms in which fundamental life processes (like cell division and protein synthesis) can be studied, without the ethical dilemmas of studying animals or humans.
3. Medicine and Materials
-Many medicinal and recreational drugs, like tetrahydrocannabinol, caffeine, and nicotine come directly from the plant kingdom. Others are simple derivatives of botanical natural products; for example, aspirin is based on the pain killer salicylic acid which originally came from the bark of willow trees. As well, the narcotic analgesics such as morphine are derived from the opium poppy.[2] There may be many novel cures for diseases provided by plants, waiting to be discovered. Popular stimulants like coffee, chocolate, tobacco, and tea also come from plants. Most alcoholic beverages come from fermenting plants such as barley (beer), rice (sake) and grapes (wine).
4. Environmental Changes
Plants can also help us understand changes in on our environment in many ways.
- Understanding habitat destruction and species extinction is dependent on an accurate and complete catalog of plant systematics and taxonomy.
- Plant responses to ultraviolet radiation can help us monitor problems like ozone depletion.
- Analyzing pollen deposited by plants thousands or millions of years ago can help scientists to reconstruct past climates and predict future ones, an essential part ofclimate change research.
- Recording and analyzing the timing of plant life cycles are important parts of phenology used in climate-change research.
- Lichens, which are sensitive to atmospheric conditions, have been extensively used as pollution indicators.
