On the Earth today there are approximately 600,000 different types of plants and over one million different kinds of animals. Remember that one of the goals of geographers is to understand how lifeforms are distributed throughout the Earth. With nearly 2 million different types of lifeforms on Earth, the task of mapping out and understanding their distribution can be overwhelming.

In order to aid them in their goals, geographers group lifeforms into categories based on how they are the same and how they are different. For the purpose of geography, the two main groups are flora and fauna.

Flora consists of all the plant life on Earth, while fauna refers to animal life.

Within the oceans, geographers sometimes categorize lifeforms a little differently. Instead of two major groups, they consider three. These are plankton, nekton, and benthos. Plankton consist of any plants and animals that float in the water. Nekton are the animals, such as fish, squid and sharks that can swim about freely from place to place. Benthos are the plants and animals found on the ocean floor.

This is different from how biologists classify living things.  They typically choose to look at living things as being in different kingdoms.

Geographer Versus Biologist

Biology is the study of life. Biologists are scientists who study lifeforms in all their varieties, and who do their best to use their knowledge about these lifeforms to both protect life on Earth, as well as help mankind.

Biologists study the complex systems within each lifeform. For example, consider a beetle. A biologist is looking to understand how the beetle’s body works. What makes its legs move back and forth, how does it digest its food, how does it fly, and so forth.

A geographer is not concerned so much with how the beetle’s body works, but rather with how the beetle affects the landscape of Earth as well as how the beetle and all of its fellow beetles are distributed around the Earth, and so forth.

Thus, biologists study the lifeform itself and how it works, while geographers look at how the same lifeform affects the Earth, other lifeforms, and how they are distributed throughout the biosphere.

Thus, it is understandable that they would categorize living things differently.