Q.A scientist has come across a plant which he feels is a new species. How will he go about its identification, classification and nomenclature.

Biological Classification Steps

To bring order to the staggering variety of organisms on Earth, taxonomists don't stop at giving each species a name — they also place every organism inside a nested series of ranks, moving from very broad groups down to a single species. This nested arrangement is called the taxonomic hierarchy, and each rank in it is a taxonomic category.

Starting from the broadest and narrowing down, the steps are:

• Kingdom — the widest group, for example Animalia or Plantae.
• Phylum (for animals) or Division (for plants) — organisms sharing a basic body plan.
• Class — a narrower group within a phylum or division.
• Order — related families grouped together on the basis of a few similar characters.
• Family — related genera grouped together, based on more similarities than an order shares.
• Genus — a group of closely related species.
• Species — the basic, smallest unit of classification: a natural population of organisms that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring, and that share more features with one another than with members of any other species.

Each category represents a fixed rank, and together the ranks make up the taxonomic hierarchy. Moving from species toward kingdom, the number of shared characteristics keeps decreasing — a genus groups very similar species, while a kingdom lumps together vastly different classes.

A worked example makes this concrete. The mango tree, Mangifera indica, belongs to genus Mangifera, family Anacardiaceae, order Sapindales, class Dicotyledonae, division Angiospermae and kingdom Plantae. In the same way, the housefly, Musca domestica, is placed in genus Musca, family Muscidae, order Diptera, class Insecta, phylum Arthropoda and kingdom Animalia. Working out an organism's position at every one of these steps is called its systematic position or identification. …