This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Biology is the study of living organisms and their structure, function and interaction, from the cell to the ecosystem, pursued through observation, classification and controlled experiment. Classified among the natural sciences, the field received its modern name in 1802, when Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck independently coined the term to unify what had until then been separate studies of plants and of animals under one discipline.
For an atlas of religion and belief, biology grounds a specific and recurring kind of religious claim, the identification of the living things a tradition uses in ritual, offering or medicine. Its plant focused and conservation focused branches, already covered elsewhere as their own disciplines, identify a species precisely enough to say what a sacred plant, a sacrificial animal or a healing herb actually is in biological terms, a question a tradition's own name for the thing does not always answer on its own, since a common name can vary by region while the organism itself does not.
That precision is why the field matters here specifically. Where a tradition names a plant or an animal as sacred, biology is the discipline able to say what species is meant, where it naturally occurs and what its documented properties are, grounding a ritual claim about a living thing in a settled biological identification rather than in a name alone.