Caucasica

Caucasica is a Latin geographic epithet used in scientific naming to indicate an association with the Caucasus, a region between Europe and Asia that includes the Greater and Lesser Caucasus mountains and parts of Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The term is commonly found as part of species names in botany and zoology, rather than as a standalone taxon.

In taxonomy, caucasica functions as an adjective that describes origin or relation to the Caucasus. Like other Latin epithets, it must agree in gender with the genus: caucasica for feminine genera, caucasicus for masculine genera, and caucasicum for neuter genera. Because the Caucasus is a biogeographic region with diverse habitats, the epithet appears across a wide range of plant and animal taxa that were first described or collected there.

Etymology and spelling derive from the Latin Caucasus (the region) with the suffix -ica forming a geographic adjective. The usage reflects a common practice in taxonomy to encode geographic provenance in species names, alongside other epithets based on geography such as asiatica or europaea.

Caucasica does not refer to a specific place or entity by itself; rather, it signals the Caucasus origin of the described organism relative to the broader biodiversity of the region. As with many geographic epithets, the exact type locality or range of a species bearing caucasica may extend beyond the Caucasus, depending on taxonomic revision and distribution data.

See also: Caucasus, geographic epithets in taxonomy, Latin binomial nomenclature.