D.K. Agrawala

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Scientist at Botanical Survey of India, Headquarters Kolkata

When we look at the various plant descriptions in floras and taxonomic revisions, people practice different ways to describe the veins. They are often called as nerves. Basically they are composed of vascular tissues responsible for transport of water and minerals. We also call the midrib of a leaf as mid vein but the branches are called as lateral nerves. It sounds funny sometimes to imagine a brain in plants with nerves spread all around.

Speciation is not an overnight process and leaves many intermediates between the two extremes. Taxonomists failed to address these variations or do not have material to link the variations or not have the infrastructure to interpret at various level or tempted to publish new species in heist for improving cv.

I have witnessed this perception among the scientists, academicians and interview panel members along with the employers. But at the same time seen many raw quality publications in high impact journals and vice versa. The publication or acceptance of paper highly depend on the quality of reviewer, the peer review process, availability of funding for publication and the biased approach of the editor/ reviewer.

While practicing plant taxonomy since past two decades, I observed lot of inconsistency in delimiting the genera or lower ranked taxa. The weight of characters are not stable in different plant groups or even within the same family. Are these all dependent on taking a balanced approach to stabilize the nomenclature or we should look for developing scientific standards to address the issue.

While working with taxonomy of Indian Orchids in past two decades, I have witnessed many merger and splitting of genera mostly as a result of phylogenetic analysis mostly based on molecular evidences. The circumscription of larger genera like Bulbophyllum, Dendrobium etc. with wider morphological variability have been expanded with merger of well established smaller genera; whereas, genera like Eria, Habenaria etc. are being splitted with many combinations. The examples are unlimited, but everywhere the logic is to make the genera monophyletic. The problem in Vandaceous genera are even more inconsistent. The question is on the perception of the authors. When we have taxonomic hierarchy like sub-genus, Section, Sub-section etc. to fit all the heterogeneity, why not use them instead of creating many small, narrower genera or merging smaller ones into bigger genera with wider circumscription.