Concept
Lithophyte
Related concepts (6)
Plant
Plants are eukaryotes, predominantly photosynthetic, that form the kingdom Plantae. Many are multicellular. Historically, the plant kingdom encompassed all living things that were not animals, and included algae and fungi. All current definitions exclude the fungi and some of the algae. By one definition, plants form the clade Viridiplantae (Latin for "green plants") which consists of the green algae and the embryophytes or land plants. The latter include hornworts, liverworts, mosses, lycophytes, ferns, conifers and other gymnosperms, and flowering plants.
Epiphyte
An epiphyte is a plant or plant-like organism that grows on the surface of another plant and derives its moisture and nutrients from the air, rain, water (in marine environments) or from debris accumulating around it. The plants on which epiphytes grow are called phorophytes. Epiphytes take part in nutrient cycles and add to both the diversity and biomass of the ecosystem in which they occur, like any other organism. They are an important source of food for many species.
Bromeliaceae
The Bromeliaceae (the bromeliads) are a family of monocot flowering plants of about 80 genera and 3700 known species, native mainly to the tropical Americas, with several species found in the American subtropics and one in tropical west Africa, Pitcairnia feliciana. It is among the basal families within the Poales and is the only family within the order that has septal nectaries and inferior ovaries. These inferior ovaries characterize the Bromelioideae, a subfamily of the Bromeliaceae.
Orchid
Orchids are plants that belong to the family Orchidaceae (ˌɔːrkɪˈdeɪsi.iː,_-si.aɪ), a diverse and widespread group of flowering plants with blooms that are often colourful and fragrant. Orchidaceae is one of the two largest families of flowering plants, along with the Asteraceae. It contains about 28,000 currently accepted species, distributed across 763 genera. Which of the two families is larger is still unclear, because new members of both of these enormous families are continually discovered.
Crassulacean acid metabolism
Crassulacean acid metabolism, also known as CAM photosynthesis, is a carbon fixation pathway that evolved in some plants as an adaptation to arid conditions that allows a plant to photosynthesize during the day, but only exchange gases at night. In a plant using full CAM, the stomata in the leaves remain shut during the day to reduce evapotranspiration, but they open at night to collect carbon dioxide () and allow it to diffuse into the mesophyll cells.
Lichen
A lichen (ˈlaɪkən , UKalsoˈlɪtʃən ) is a composite organism that arises from algae or cyanobacteria living among filaments of multiple fungi species in a mutualistic relationship. Lichens are important actors in nutrient cycling and act as producers which many higher trophic feeders feed on, such as reindeer, gastropods, nematodes, mites, and springtails. Lichens have properties different from those of their component organisms. They come in many colors, sizes, and forms and are sometimes plant-like, but are not plants.