Vascular tissue in the context of Dicot

The ferns (Polypodiopsida or Polypodiophyta) are a group of vascular plants (land plants with vascular tissues such as xylem and phloem) that reproduce via spores and have neither seeds nor flowers. They differ from non-vascular plants (mosses, hornworts and liverworts) by having specialized transport bundles that conduct water and nutrients from and to the roots, as well as life cycles in which the branched sporophyte is the dominant phase.

Ferns have complex leaves called megaphylls that are more complex than the microphylls of clubmosses. Most ferns are leptosporangiate ferns that produce coiled fiddleheads that uncoil and expand into fronds. The group includes about 10,560 known extant species. Ferns are defined here in the broad sense, being all of the Polypodiopsida, comprising both the leptosporangiate (Polypodiidae) and eusporangiate ferns, the latter group including horsetails, whisk ferns, marattioid ferns and ophioglossoid ferns.

A herbivore is an animal anatomically and physiologically evolved to feed on plants, especially upon vascular tissues such as foliage, fruits or seeds, as the main component of its diet. These more broadly also encompass animals that eat non-vascular autotrophs such as mosses, algae and lichens, but do not include those feeding on decomposed plant matters (i.e. detritivores) or macrofungi (i.e. fungivores).

As a result of their plant-based diet, herbivorous animals typically have mouth structures (jaws or mouthparts) well adapted to mechanically break down plant materials, and their digestive systems have special enzymes (e.g. amylase and cellulase) to digest polysaccharides. Grazing herbivores such as horses and cattles have wide flat-crowned teeth that are better adapted for grinding grass, tree bark and other tougher lignin-containing materials, and many of them evolved rumination or cecotropic behaviors to better extract nutrients from plants. A large percentage of herbivores also have mutualistic gut flora made up of bacteria and protozoans that help to degrade the cellulose in plants, whose heavily cross-linking polymer structure makes it far more difficult to digest than the protein- and fat-rich animal tissues that carnivores eat.

Non-vascular plants are plants without a vascular system consisting of xylem and phloem. Instead, they may possess simpler tissues that have specialized functions for the internal transport of water.

Non-vascular plants include two distantly related groups:

The ground tissue of plants includes all tissues that are neither dermal nor vascular. It can be divided into three types based on the nature of the cell walls. This tissue system is present between the dermal tissue and forms the main bulk of the plant body.

1. Parenchyma cells have thin primary walls and usually remain alive after they become mature. Parenchyma forms the "filler" tissue in the soft parts of plants, and is usually present in cortex, pericycle, pith, and medullary rays in primary stem and root.
2. Collenchyma cells have thin primary walls with some areas of secondary thickening. Collenchyma provides extra mechanical and structural support, particularly in regions of new growth.
3. Sclerenchyma cells have thick lignified secondary walls and often die when mature. Sclerenchyma provides the main structural support to the plant.
4. Aerenchyma cells are found in aquatic plants. They are also known to be parenchyma cells with large air cavities surrounded by irregular cells which form columns called trabeculae.

In botany, a fascicle is a bundle of leaves or flowers growing crowded together; alternatively the term might refer to the vascular tissues that supply such an organ with nutrients. However, vascular tissues may occur in fascicles even when the organs they supply are not fascicled.

A pulvinus (pl. pulvini) may refer to a joint-like thickening at the base of a plant leaf or leaflet that facilitates growth-independent movement. Pulvinus is also a botanical term for the persistent peg-like bases of the leaves in the coniferous genera Picea and Tsuga. Pulvinar movement is common, for example, in members of the bean family Fabaceae (Leguminosae) and the prayer plant family Marantaceae.

Pulvini may be present at the base of the leaf stalk or on its other end (apex), where the leaf is attached, or in a compound leaf at the place where the leaflets are joined to its middle stem. They consist of a core of vascular tissue within a flexible, bulky cylinder of thin-walled parenchyma cells. A pulvinus is also sometimes called a geniculum (meaning a knee-like structure in Latin).

Thallus (pl.: thalli), from Latinized Greek θαλλός (thallos), meaning "a green shoot" or "twig", is the vegetative tissue of some organisms in diverse groups such as algae, fungi, some liverworts, lichens, and the Myxogastria. A thallus usually names the entire body of a multicellular non-moving organism in which there is no organization of the tissues into organs. Many of these organisms were previously known as the thallophytes, a polyphyletic group of distantly related organisms. An organism or structure resembling a thallus is called thalloid, thalloidal, thalliform, thalline, or thallose.

Even though thalli do not have organized and distinct parts (leaves, roots, and stems) as do the vascular plants, they may have analogous structures that resemble their vascular "equivalents". The analogous structures have similar function or macroscopic structure, but different microscopic structure; for example, no thallus has vascular tissue. In exceptional cases such as the Lemnoideae, where the structure of a vascular plant is in fact thallus-like, it is referred to as having a thalloid structure, or sometimes as a thalloid.

Polysporangiophytes, also called polysporangiates or formally Polysporangiophyta, are plants in which the spore-bearing generation (sporophyte) has branching stems (axes) that bear sporangia. The name literally means 'many sporangia plant'. The clade includes all land plants (embryophytes) except for the bryophytes (liverworts, mosses and hornworts) whose sporophytes are normally unbranched, even if a few exceptional cases occur. While the definition is independent of the presence of vascular tissue, all living polysporangiophytes also have vascular tissue, i.e., are vascular plants or tracheophytes. Extinct polysporangiophytes are known that have no vascular tissue and so are not tracheophytes.

C₄ carbon fixation or the Hatch–Slack pathway is one of three known photosynthetic processes of carbon fixation in plants. It owes the names to the 1960s discovery by Marshall Davidson Hatch and Charles Roger Slack.

C₄ fixation is an addition to the ancestral and more common C₃ carbon fixation. The main carboxylating enzyme in C₃ photosynthesis is called RuBisCO, which catalyses two distinct reactions using either CO₂ (carboxylation) or oxygen (oxygenation) as a substrate. RuBisCO oxygenation gives rise to phosphoglycolate, which is toxic and requires the expenditure of energy to recycle through photorespiration. C₄ photosynthesis reduces photorespiration by concentrating CO₂ around RuBisCO.