Nature in the city: how to protect Perth’s Banksia woodlands?
Concerned scientists have come together to identify key threats and research priorities for a Threatened Ecological Community in Western Australia.
Laura Skates
Laura Skates is a botanist and science communicator from Western Australia. Her research focuses on the unusual nutritional ecology of carnivorous plants in their natural habitats, and her passions include conservation, botanical art, floral fashion, and literally anything else plant-related. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @floraskates
A carnivorous plant that feeds its pollinators
Edible floral trichomes discovered in bee-pollinated Pinguicula species show carnivorous plants can feed insects as well as feed on insects.
Hungry for fungi: green mycoheterotrophic plants are far more common than previously thought
A surprising number of plants snack on fungi as well as sunshine.
Urban environments and climate change: how do we choose resilient urban trees for the future?
State of the World’s Plants and Fungi: Does conservation policy help or hinder scientific research?
Policies brought into protect plants could also cause harm by restricting research into habitats.
Where do halophytes grow? Influence of elevation, flooding, and salinity in a non-tidal saltmarsh
Unpredictability means that the traits needed to survive in seasonally flooded marshes are different to tidally flooded marshes.
Tricky flowers: how floral variation in a food-deceptive orchid is maintained over generations
Sometimes it’s a good idea not to send a consistent message to your pollinators.
How a conifer spread between isolated mountain-tops: the demographic history of Podocarpus latifolius/milanjianus
Were there land-bridges in the past that enabled trees to travel from mountaintop to mountaintop?
Dying to grow: Programmed Cell Death key to an epiphytic orchid’s root development
Li and colleagues combined the use of transmission electron microscopy, x-ray microtomography, and transcriptome methods to characterize the major anatomical and molecular changes that occur during the development and death of velamen radicum cells of Cymbidium tracyanum, a typical epiphytic orchid.
Staminodes of Aquilegia: how an unusual floral organ develops
Why would a flower want sterile stamens. An investigation into their development yields some clues.