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Ruppia Maritima
''Ruppia maritima'' is an aquatic plant species commonly known as beaked tasselweed, ditch grass, tassel pondweed and widgeon grass. Despite its scientific name, it is not a marine plant; is perhaps best described as a salt-tolerant freshwater species.Kantrud, H. A. (1991)Classification and Distribution - Wigeongrass (''Ruppia maritima'' L.): A literature review. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The generic name ''Ruppia'' was dedicated by Linnaeus to the German botanist Heinrich Bernhard Ruppius (1689-1719) and the specific name (maritima) translates to "of the sea". Distribution It can be found throughout the world, most often in coastal areas, where it grows in brackish water bodies, such as marshes. It is a dominant plant in a great many shoreline regions. It does not grow well in turbid water or low-oxygen substrates.Kantrud, H. A. (1991)Habitat - Wigeongrass (''Ruppia maritima'' L.): A literature review. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Description ''Ruppia maritima'' i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carl Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus (; 23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after his ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné Blunt (2004), p. 171. (), was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy". Many of his writings were in Latin; his name is rendered in Latin as and, after his 1761 ennoblement, as . Linnaeus was born in Råshult, the countryside of Småland, in southern Sweden. He received most of his higher education at Uppsala University and began giving lectures in botany there in 1730. He lived abroad between 1735 and 1738, where he studied and also published the first edition of his ' in the Netherlands. He then returned to Sweden where he became professor of medicine and botany at Uppsala. In the 1740s, he was sent on several journeys through Sweden to find and classify plants and animals. In the 1750s and 1760s, he continued to collect an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Biological Dispersal
Biological dispersal refers to both the movement of individuals (animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, etc.) from their birth site to their breeding site ('natal dispersal'), as well as the movement from one breeding site to another ('breeding dispersal'). Dispersal is also used to describe the movement of propagules such as seeds and spores. Technically, dispersal is defined as any movement that has the potential to lead to gene flow. The act of dispersal involves three phases: departure, transfer, settlement and there are different fitness costs and benefits associated with each of these phases. Through simply moving from one habitat patch to another, the dispersal of an individual has consequences not only for individual fitness, but also for population dynamics, population genetics, and species distribution. Understanding dispersal and the consequences both for evolutionary strategies at a species level, and for processes at an ecosystem level, requires understanding on th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Salt Marsh Plants
Salt is a mineral composed primarily of sodium chloride (NaCl), a chemical compound belonging to the larger class of salts; salt in the form of a natural crystalline mineral is known as rock salt or halite. Salt is present in vast quantities in seawater. The open ocean has about of solids per liter of sea water, a salinity of 3.5%. Salt is essential for life in general, and saltiness is one of the basic human tastes. Salt is one of the oldest and most ubiquitous food seasonings, and is known to uniformly improve the taste perception of food, including otherwise unpalatable food. Salting, brining, and pickling are also ancient and important methods of food preservation. Some of the earliest evidence of salt processing dates to around 6,000 BC, when people living in the area of present-day Romania boiled spring water to extract salts; a salt-works in China dates to approximately the same period. Salt was also prized by the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Freshwater Plants
Fresh water or freshwater is any naturally occurring liquid or frozen water containing low concentrations of dissolved salts and other total dissolved solids. Although the term specifically excludes seawater and brackish water, it does include non- salty mineral-rich waters such as chalybeate springs. Fresh water may encompass frozen and meltwater in ice sheets, ice caps, glaciers, snowfields and icebergs, natural precipitations such as rainfall, snowfall, hail/ sleet and graupel, and surface runoffs that form inland bodies of water such as wetlands, ponds, lakes, rivers, streams, as well as groundwater contained in aquifers, subterranean rivers and lakes. Fresh water is the water resource that is of the most and immediate use to humans. Water is critical to the survival of all living organisms. Many organisms can thrive on salt water, but the great majority of higher plants and most insects, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds need fresh water to survive. Fresh water i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brackish Water Plants
Brackish water, sometimes termed brack water, is water occurring in a natural environment that has more salinity than freshwater, but not as much as seawater. It may result from mixing seawater (salt water) and fresh water together, as in estuary, estuaries, or it may occur in brackish fossil aquifers. The word comes from the Middle Dutch root '':wikt:brak#Dutch, brak''. Certain human activities can produce brackish water, in particular civil engineering projects such as dikes and the flooding of coastal marshland to produce brackish water pools for freshwater prawn farming. Brackish water is also the primary waste product of the Osmotic power, salinity gradient power process. Because brackish water is hostile to the growth of most terrestrial plant species, without appropriate management it is damaging to the environment (see article on shrimp farming, shrimp farms). Technically, brackish water contains between 0.5 and 30 grams of salt per litre—more often expressed as 0.5 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ruppia
''Ruppia'', also known as the widgeonweeds, ditch grasses or widgeon grass, is the only extant genus in the family Ruppiaceae, with eight known species. These are aquatic plants widespread over much of the world. The genus name honours Heinrich Bernhard Rupp, a German botanist (1688-1719). They are widespread outside of frigid zones and the tropics. Description The leaf is simple and not rhizomatous. They can be annual (commonly) or perennial (rarely); stem growth is conspicuously sympodial, but sometimes is not. These species are adapted to be in brackish water (and salt marshes). The leaves are small or medium-sized. Their disposition can be alternate, opposite, or whorled (usually alternate except when subtending an inflorescence). Even, lamina keep entire and are setaceous or linear. The leaf just shows one vein without cross-venules. Stomata are not present. The mesophyll leaks calcium oxalate crystals. The minor leaf veins do not present phloem transfer cells and leaks ves ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Constructed Wetland
A constructed wetland is an artificial wetland to treat sewage, greywater, stormwater runoff or industrial wastewater. It may also be designed for land reclamation after mining, or as a mitigation step for natural areas lost to land development. Constructed wetlands are engineered systems that use the natural functions of vegetation, soil, and organisms to provide secondary treatment to wastewater. The design of the constructed wetland has to be adjusted according to the type of wastewater to be treated. Constructed wetlands have been used in both centralized and decentralized wastewater systems. Primary treatment is recommended when there is a large amount of suspended solids or soluble organic matter (measured as biochemical oxygen demand and chemical oxygen demand). Similar to natural wetlands, constructed wetlands also act as a biofilter and/or can remove a range of pollutants (such as organic matter, nutrients, pathogens, heavy metals) from the water. Constructed wetlands are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wetland Classification
Classification of wetlands has been a problematical task, with the commonly accepted definition of what constitutes a wetland being among the major difficulties. A number of national wetland classifications exist. In the 1970s, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance introduced a first attempt to establish an internationally acceptable wetland classification scheme. Ramsar classification The Ramsar classification of wetland types is intended as a means for fast identification of the main types of wetlands for the purposes of the Convention. The wetlands are classified into three major classes: *Marine/coastal wetlands *Inland wetlands *Human-made wetlands These are further subdivided by the type of water: fresh / saline / brackish / alkaline; and may be further classified by the substrate type of other characteristics. National systems of classification Australia Wetlands in Australia that considered to be of national importance are so classified by cr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wetland Conservation
Wetland conservation is aimed at protecting and preserving areas where water exists at or near the Earth's surface, such as swamps, marshes and bogs. Wetlands cover at least six per cent of the Earth and have become a focal issue for conservation due to the ecosystem services they provide. More than three billion people, around half the world’s population, obtain their basic water needs from inland freshwater wetlands. The same number of people rely on rice as their staple food, a crop grown largely in natural and artificial wetlands. In some parts of the world, such as the Kilombero wetland in Tanzania, almost the entire local population relies on wetland cultivation for their livelihoods. Fisheries are also an extremely important source of protein and income in many wetlands. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the total catch from inland waters (rivers and wetlands) was 8.7 million metric tonnes in 2002. In addition to food, wetlands supply fibre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wetland Indicator Status
Wetland indicator status denotes the probability of individual species of vascular plants occurring in freshwater, brackish and saltwater wetlands in the United States. The wetland status of 7,000 plants is determined upon information contained in a list compiled in the National Wetland Inventory undertaken by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and developed in cooperation with a federal inter-agency review panel (Reed, 1988). The National List was compiled in 1988 with subsequent revisions in 1996 and 1998. The wetland indicator status of a species is based upon the individual species occurrence in wetlands in 13 separate regions within the United States. In some instances the specified regions contain all or part of different floristic provinces and the tension zones which occur between them. While many Obligate Wetland (OBL) species do occur in permanently or semi-permanently flooded wetlands, there are also a number of obligates that occur in temporary or seasonally flooded w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Restoration Ecology
Restoration ecology is the scientific study supporting the practice of ecological restoration, which is the practice of renewing and restoring degraded, damaged, or destroyed ecosystems and habitats in the environment by active human interruption and action. Effective restoration requires an explicit goal or policy, preferably an unambiguous one that is articulated, accepted, and codified. Restoration goals reflect societal choices from among competing policy priorities, but extracting such goals is typically contentious and politically challenging. Natural ecosystems provide ecosystem services in the form of resources such as food, fuel, and timber; the purification of air and water; the detoxification and decomposition of wastes; the regulation of climate; the regeneration of soil fertility; and the pollination of crops. These ecosystem processes have been estimated to be worth trillions of dollars annually. There is consensus in the scientific community that the current envi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Waterfowl
Anseriformes is an order of birds also known as waterfowl that comprises about 180 living species of birds in three families: Anhimidae (three species of screamers), Anseranatidae (the magpie goose), and Anatidae, the largest family, which includes over 170 species of waterfowl, among them the ducks, geese, and swans. Most modern species in the order are highly adapted for an aquatic existence at the water surface. With the exception of screamers, males have penises, a trait that has been lost in the Neoaves. Due to their aquatic nature, most species are web-footed. Evolution Anseriformes are one of only two types of modern bird to be confirmed present during the Mesozoic alongside the other dinosaurs, and in fact were among the very few birds to survive their extinction, along with their cousins the galliformes. These two groups only occupied two ecological niches during the Mesozoic, living in water and on the ground, while the toothed enantiornithes were the dominant bird ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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