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Human uses of plants include both practical uses, such as for food, clothing, and medicine, and symbolic uses, such as in art, mythology and literature. Materials derived from plants are collectively called plant products .
Trees play a significant role in reducing erosion and moderating the climate. They remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store large quantities of carbon in their tissues. Trees and forests provide a habitat for many species of animals and plants. Tropical rainforests are among the most biodiverse habitats in the world.
Plants including trees are important in mythology and religion, where they symbolise themes such as fertility, growth, immortality and rebirth, and may be more or less magical. [ 114 ] [ 115 ] Thus in Latvian mythology , Austras koks is a tree which grows from the start of the Sun's daily journey across the sky.
[57] [58] These phytochemicals have potential for use as drugs, [59] and the content and known pharmacological activity of these substances in medicinal plants is the scientific basis for their use in modern medicine, if scientifically confirmed. [4]
The Earth’s trees absorb more than 7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide — about a fifth of what the world lets out into its atmosphere — and release it back as oxygen or bind it into ...
Human beings, observing the growth and death of trees, and the annual death and revival of their foliage, [1] [2] have often seen them as powerful symbols of growth, death and rebirth. Evergreen trees, which largely stay green throughout these cycles, are sometimes considered symbols of the eternal, immortality or fertility.
This article contains a list of useful plants, meaning a plant that has been or can be co-opted by humans to fulfill a particular need. Rather than listing all plants on one page, this page instead collects the lists and categories for the different ways in which a plant can be used; some plants may fall into several of the categories or lists ...
The idea of a tree of life arose from ancient notions of a ladder-like progression from lower into higher forms of life (such as in the Great Chain of Being).Early representations of "branching" phylogenetic trees include a "paleontological chart" showing the geological relationships among plants and animals in the book Elementary Geology, by Edward Hitchcock (first edition: 1840).