When a biologist is searching for new plant species, what is the process for figuring out if a particular species has been found before? Is there some sort of giant database that has a flowchart of characteristics they follow to narrow down what species a plant is until they hit a dead end?
Or I guess more broadly, what is the process a biologist would follow to identify any plant if they are not sure what it is?
In: Biology
This is what Peer Edited journals are for. If you think you have found a new species, you search through the journals for similar species and check if yours matches those. Maybe even get a sample.
Then, once you are sure yours is different, you publish a paper describing your species and why you think it is different.
Then everyone with a related species sees your article and says “hmm, that sounds like mine” so they repeat what you did and might publish a paper saying “no this is my species, therefore mine is a senior synonym.”
And then they go back and forth until a consensus is reached.
https://wfoplantlist.org/ tries to keep track of all of this, but I dont know how accurate it is.
As for what properties they use… That is an open question. I have a friend who is using 2-DGE with biomarker to argue a senior synonym of a nematode against someone who figured measuring tail width variation was enough or something (thats his research, not mine, I dont really know whats going on fully). So its basically “what properties can we get away with”
One cool way is you take 2 species you think might be different and you hybridize them, then keep breeding the hybrids. If they are truly different then in a couple generations the hybrid line will split back into distinct species (or is just generally infertile).
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