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Gyrocarpus Americanus
''Gyrocarpus americanus'' is a flowering plant in the ''Hernandiaceae'' family, with a wide pantropical distribution. Its common names include the helicopter tree, propeller tree, whirly whirly tree, stinkwood or shitwood. Description ''Gyrocarpus americanus'' is a slender, deciduous tree with smooth, grey bark. The tree grows to about 12 m in height. The leaves are spirally arranged, crowded near the ends of the branches, and grow up to 150 × 120 mm in size. They are ovate, often 3-lobed, dark green above, paler and greyer below, with velvety surfaces, 3-veined from the base. The veins are yellowish. The cream to yellowish-green flowers grow in compact heads and have an unpleasant smell. The fruit is a woody nut with two long thin wings that help in wind dispersal. The winged fruit and the smell of the flowers have given the tree its various common names. Taxonomy Subspecies * ''G. a. africanus'' Kubitzki (Africa) * ''G. a. americanus'' Jacq. (East Africa, Ind ...
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Nikolaus Joseph Von Jacquin
Nikolaus Joseph Freiherr von Jacquin (16 February 172726 October 1817) was a scientist who studied medicine, chemistry and botany. Biography Born in Leiden in the Netherlands, he studied medicine at Leiden University, then moved first to Paris and afterward to Vienna. In 1752, he studied under Gerard van Swieten in Vienna. Between 1755 and 1759, Jacquin was sent to the West Indies, Central America, Venezuela and New Granada by Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor, Francis I to collect plants for the Schönbrunn Palace, and amassed a large collection of animal, plant and mineral samples. In 1797, Alexander von Humboldt profited from studying these collections and conversing with Jacquin in preparation of his own journey to the Americas. In 1763, Jacquin became professor of chemistry and mineralogy at the Mining Academy (Banská Štiavnica), Bergakademie Schemnitz (now Banská Štiavnica in Slovakia). In 1768, he was appointed Professor of Botany and Chemistry and became director of ...
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Polynesia
Polynesia ( , ) is a subregion of Oceania, made up of more than 1,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean. The indigenous people who inhabit the islands of Polynesia are called Polynesians. They have many things in common, including Polynesian languages, linguistic relations, Polynesian culture, cultural practices, and Tradition, traditional beliefs. In centuries past, they had a strong shared tradition of sailing and Polynesian navigation, using stars to navigate at night. The term was first used in 1756 by the French writer Charles de Brosses, who originally applied it to all the list of islands in the Pacific Ocean, islands of the Pacific. In 1831, Jules Dumont d'Urville proposed a narrower definition during a lecture at the Société de Géographie of Paris. By tradition, the islands located in the South Seas, southern Pacific have also often been called the South Sea Islands, and their inhabitants have been called South Sea Islanders. The Hawai ...
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Flora Of India (region)
The flora of India is one of the richest in the world due to the wide range of climate, topology and habitat in the country. There are estimated to be over 18,000 species of flowering plants in India, which constitute some 6-7 percent of the total plant species in the world. India is home to more than 50,000 species of plants, including a variety of endemics. The use of plants as a source of medicines has been an integral part of life in India from the earliest times. There are more than 3000 Indian plant species officially documented as possessing into eight main floristic regions : Western Himalayas, Eastern Himalayas, Assam, Indus plain, Ganges plain, the Deccan, Malabar and the Andaman Islands. Forests and wildlife resources In 1992, 743,534 km2 of land in the country was forested of which 92 percent was government land. This amounts to 22.7 percent land coverage, compared to the recommended 33 percent of the National Forest Policy Resolution 1952. The majority ...
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Flora Of Madagascar
The flora of Madagascar consists of more than 12,000 species of plants, as well as a poorly known number of fungi and algae. Around 83% of Madagascar's vascular plants are found only on the island. These endemics include five plant families, 85% of the over 900 orchid species, around 200 species of palms, and such emblematic species as the traveller's tree, six species of baobab and the Madagascar periwinkle. The high degree of endemism is due to Madagascar's long isolation following its separation from the African and Indian landmasses in the Mesozoic, 150–160 and 84–91 million years ago, respectively. However, few plant lineages remain from the ancient Gondwanan flora; most extant plant groups immigrated via across-ocean dispersal well after continental break-up. After its continental separation, Madagascar probably experienced a dry period, and tropical rainforest expanded only later in the Oligocene to Miocene when rainfall increased. Today, humid forests, includ ...
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Flora Of Africa
Flora (: floras or florae) is all the plant life present in a particular region or time, generally the naturally occurring ( indigenous) native plants. The corresponding term for animals is ''fauna'', and for fungi, it is '' funga''. Sometimes bacteria and fungi are also referred to as flora as in the terms ''gut flora'' or ''skin flora'' for purposes of specificity. Etymology The word "flora" comes from the Latin name of Flora, the goddess of plants, flowers, and fertility in Roman mythology. The technical term "flora" is then derived from a metonymy of this goddess at the end of the sixteenth century. It was first used in poetry to denote the natural vegetation of an area, but soon also assumed the meaning of a work cataloguing such vegetation. Moreover, "Flora" was used to refer to the flowers of an artificial garden in the seventeenth century. The distinction between vegetation (the general appearance of a community) and flora (the taxonomic composition of a community) wa ...
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Journal Of Biogeography
The ''Journal of Biogeography'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal that was established in 1974. It covers aspects of spatial, ecological, and historical biogeography. The founding editor-in-chief was David Watts, followed by John Flenley (1936–2018), Philip Stott (1987-2004), Robert J. Whittaker (2004–2015), and Peter Linder (University of Zurich; 2015–2019). As of early 2023, the editor-in-chief was Michael N Dawson (University of California, Merced). Since 2024, the journal has changed its editorial board The editorial board is a group of editors, writers, and other people who are charged with implementing a publication's approach to editorials and other opinion pieces. The editorials published normally represent the views or goals of the publicat ..., and the new senior editors are Arley Muth, Luciano Bosso, Alison Nazareno, and Diogo Provete. Abstracting and indexing The journal is abstracted and indexed in: References External links * {{DEFAULTSO ...
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Outrigger Boat
Outrigger boats are various watercraft featuring one or more lateral support floats known as outriggers, which are fastened to one or both sides of the main hull (watercraft), hull. They can range from small dugout (boat), dugout canoes to large plank-built vessels. Outrigger boats can also vary in their configuration, from the ancestral double-hull configuration (catamarans), to single-outrigger vessels prevalent in the Pacific Islands and Madagascar, to the double-outrigger vessels (trimarans) prevalent in Maritime Southeast Asia, Island Southeast Asia. They are traditionally fitted with Austronesian sails, like the crab claw sails and tanja sails, but in modern times are often fitted with petrol engines. Unlike a single-hulled vessel, an outrigger or double-hull vessel generates stability as a result of the distance between its hulls rather than due to the shape of each individual hull. As such, the hulls of outrigger or double-hull boats are typically longer, narrower and mo ...
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Tonga
Tonga, officially the Kingdom of Tonga, is an island country in Polynesia, part of Oceania. The country has 171 islands, of which 45 are inhabited. Its total surface area is about , scattered over in the southern Pacific Ocean. according to Johnson's Tribune, Tonga has a population of 104,494, 70% of whom reside on the main island, Tongatapu. The country stretches approximately north-south. It is surrounded by Fiji and Wallis and Futuna (France) to the northwest, Samoa to the northeast, New Caledonia (France) and Vanuatu to the west, Niue (the nearest foreign territory) to the east and Kermadec (New Zealand) to the southwest. Tonga is about from New Zealand's North Island. Tonga was first inhabited roughly 2,500 years ago by the Lapita civilization, Polynesian settlers who gradually evolved a distinct and strong ethnic identity, language, and culture as the Tongan people. They quickly established a powerful footing across the South Pacific, and this period of Tong ...
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Monophyly
In biological cladistics for the classification of organisms, monophyly is the condition of a taxonomic grouping being a clade – that is, a grouping of organisms which meets these criteria: # the grouping contains its own most recent common ancestor (or more precisely an ancestral population), i.e. excludes non-descendants of that common ancestor # the grouping contains all the descendants of that common ancestor, without exception Monophyly is contrasted with paraphyly and polyphyly as shown in the second diagram. A ''paraphyletic'' grouping meets 1. but not 2., thus consisting of the descendants of a common ancestor, excepting one or more monophyletic subgroups. A ''polyphyletic'' grouping meets neither criterion, and instead serves to characterize convergent relationships of biological features rather than genetic relationships – for example, night-active primates, fruit trees, or aquatic insects. As such, these characteristic features of a polyphyletic grouping are ...
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Transpacific Diffusion
Pre-Columbian transoceanic contact theories, many of which are speculative, propose that visits to the Americas, interactions with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, or both, were made by people from elsewhere prior to Christopher Columbus's Columbus's first voyage, first voyage to the Caribbean in 1492. Studies between 2004 and 2009 suggest the possibility that the earliest human Settlement of the Americas, migrations to the Americas may have been made by boat from Beringia and travel down the Pacific coast, contemporary with and possibly predating land migrations over the Beringia, Beringia land bridge, which during the glacial period joined what today are Siberia and Alaska. Apart from Norse colonization of North America, Norse contact and settlement, whether transoceanic travel occurred during the historic period, resulting in pre-Columbian contact between the settled American peoples and voyagers from other continents, is vigorously debated. Only a few cases of pre-C ...
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Neotropics
The Neotropical realm is one of the eight biogeographic realms constituting Earth's land surface. Physically, it includes the tropical terrestrial ecoregions of the Americas and the entire South American temperate zone. Definition In biogeography, the Neotropic or Neotropical realm is one of the eight terrestrial realms. This realm includes South America, Central America, the Caribbean Islands, and southern North America. In Mexico, the Yucatán Peninsula and southern lowlands, and most of the east and west coastlines, including the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula are Neotropical. In the United States southern Florida and coastal Central Florida are considered Neotropical. The realm also includes temperate southern South America. In contrast, the Neotropical Floristic Kingdom excludes southernmost South America, which instead is placed in the Antarctic kingdom. The Neotropic is delimited by similarities in fauna or flora. Its fauna and flora are distin ...
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Palaeotropics
The Paleotropical kingdom (Paleotropis) is a floristic kingdom composed of the tropical areas of Africa, Asia and Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand), as proposed by Ronald Good and Armen Takhtajan. Part of its flora is inherited from the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana or exchanged later (e.g. Piperaceae with pantropical distribution and but few warm temperate representatives). These Gondwanan lineages are related to those in the Neotropical kingdom, composed of the tropical areas of Central and South America. Flora from the Paleotropical kingdom influenced the tropical flora of the Australian Kingdom. The kingdom is subdivided into five floristic subkingdoms according to Takhtajan (or three, according to Good) and about 13 floristic regions. In this article the floristic subkingdoms and regions are given as delineated by Takhtajan. Origin A distinct community of vascular plants evolved millions of years ago, and are now found on several separate areas. Millions ...
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