Systematics and taxonomy are complementary scientific disciplines within the biological sciences that address organismal diversity and evolutionary relationships. Systematics encompasses the study and inference of phylogenetic relationships using morphological, molecular, behavioral, and biochemical data, often employing cladistic, probabilistic, or distance-based methods to reconstruct evolutionary histories and test hypotheses of common ancestry. Taxonomy provides the principles and rules for discovering, describing, naming, and classifying organisms, including species delimitation, typification, and hierarchical ranking under formal codes of nomenclature. Together, systematics and taxonomy generate a predictive classification framework that reflects phylogeny and underpins comparative biology, biodiversity assessment, and conservation planning.
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