Biota!

Biota! was a proposed aquarium in the Silvertown Quays redevelopment, on the site of Millennium Mills adjacent to the Royal Victoria Dock, part of the wider Thames Gateway regeneration project for East London. The £80 million building by Terry Farrell & Partners architects was given outline planning permission in March 2005 and was initially expected to be completed in 2008. Biota! would have formed one of the main public attractions of the 60-acre (24 ha), £1.5 billion development, along with Silvertown Venture Xtreme, an extreme sports and surf centre.

Biota! was to be operated by the Zoological Society of London and would have been the world's first aquarium entirely based on the principles of conservation. The design for the aquarium incorporated four biomes, each representing an entire ecosystem including trees, other plants, invertebrates, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds as well as fish.

The planned completion date slipped as the Silvertown Quays development struggled to secure funding. In June 2008, Building magazine announced that the aquarium was "under review because of the credit crunch", citing the global financial crisis as the reason for the lack of progress on the project. This placed the rest of the development in jeopardy because the planning obligations required the aquarium to be built before the rest of the scheme. In September 2009, the landowner London Development Agency withdrew from the agreement, effectively ending the project.

Biota

Biota may refer to:

Biota (ecology)

A biota is the total collection of organisms of a geographic region or a time period, from local geographic scales and instantaneous temporal scales all the way up to whole-planet and whole-timescale spatiotemporal scales. The biotas of the Earth make up the biosphere.

See also

Flora, fauna and other forms of life such as fungi are collectively referred to as biota.

References

Biota, Zaragoza

Biota is a municipality (pop. 1,202) in the Spanish province of Zaragoza, in the autonomous community of Aragon.

Coordinates: 42°15′N 1°10′W / 42.250°N 1.167°W / 42.250; -1.167

Biota (taxonomy)

In some systems of scientific classification, Biota,Vitae,Eobionti is the superdomain that classifies all life. For that reason it is often disputed how the taxon should be further divided, as the definition of "what life really is" is often changed or adjusted, and also if extraterrestrial life would be included besides the life on Earth, if extraterrestrial life is discovered. In general, all cellular life is naturally included in the Biota; when there is mention of non-cellular life the taxon Biota is most often simply divided into Cytota (cellular life) and Acytota (non-cellular life).

Historically, what was not mineralia (i.e. minerals), could also be referred to as biota (i.e., fauna, fungi and flora).

See also

References

External links

Platycladus

Platycladus is a distinct genus of evergreen coniferous tree in the cypress family Cupressaceae, containing only one species, Platycladus orientalis, also known as Chinese thuja,Oriental arborvitae,Chinese arborvitae, biota or oriental thuja. It is native to northwestern China, Korea, and the Russian Far East (Amur + Khabarovsk). It is also now naturalised as an introduced species elsewhere in Asia: eastward to Japan; southward to northern India; and westward to northern Iran.

Taxonomy

Although generally accepted as the only member of its genus, it has been suggested that the closely related species Microbiota decussata could be included in Platycladus, but this is not widely followed. Other fairly close relatives are Juniperus and Cupressus, both of these genera being graft-compatible with Platycladus. In older texts, Platycladus was often included in Thuja, which is reflected in one of its common names, "oriental thuja". But it is only distantly related to the genus Thuja. Differences include its distinct cones, wingless seeds, and its almost scentless foliage.