Opuntia aciculata Opuntia aciculata Opuntia aciculata, also called Chenille pricklypear, old man's whiskers, and cowboy’s red whiskers, is a perennial dicot and an attractive ornamental cactus native to Texas. It belongs to the genus "Opuntia" prickly pear cacti. It is also widespread in Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas (northern Mexico). It was reported from Nuevo León, Mexico, according to D. Weniger in 1970. The specific name "aciculata" derives from many sources: the Latin word "acicula" which means “a small pin for a headdress”, and the adjectival suffix for nouns "atus", meaning possessive of or likeness to something (with, shaped, made), while for verb participles
Plant functional type Plant functional type Plant functional types (PFTs) is a system used by climatologists to classify plants according to their physical, phylogenetic and phenological characteristics as part of an overall effort to develop a vegetation model for use in land use studies and climate models. PFTs provide a finer level of modeling than biomes, which represent gross areas such as desert, savannah, deciduous forest. In creating a PFT model, areas as small as 1 km are modeled by defining the predominant plant type for that area, interpreted from satellite data or other means. For each plant functional type, a number of