I was a bit fed up after hearing the UK government announce further cutbacks to the science budget today, so I thought I’d delve into the recent Free Access issue of Annals of Botany from Sept 2009 to see...
Category - Ecosystems
Alun Salt
Ignore the small things at your peril…
Image: Gordon T. Taylor, US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. H. G. Wells dramatically demonstrated how mankind’s future may depend upon the action of small organisms in his War of the Worlds where...
Nigel Chaffey
Pollen viability in Mediterranean orchids
Pollen viability in Mediterranean orchids Evaluation of pollen viability has generally been confined to a relatively low number of species. Bellusci et al. study five related Mediterranean orchid genera (Anacamptis...
botanyone
Plant resource-use strategies and phenotypic plasticity
Plant resource-use strategies and phenotypic plasticity In subalpine grasslands, where a large diversity of habitats can occur over short distances, differing resource-use strategies will determine which species...
Even plants can have too much of a good thing
No doubt this will horrify Pat, but this is one of my favourite YouTube videos. If you’ve ever expressed a doubt about something, only to be told it must be ok because it’s natural, this is the video for you...
Foresight, hindsight and biodiversity
I was looking at the downloads of papers from Annals of Botany over the last year. In the top ten of most downloaded papers was one from 1997 (certainly when I relied on photocopiers rather than PDFs). It was on the...
Editor Pat Heslop-Harrison
Will ferns play a key role in mitigating climate change for some forests?
There’s an interesting paper in the July edition of the American Journal of Botany, Polystichum munitum (Dryopteridaceae) varies geographically in its capacity to absorb fog water by foliar uptake within the...
Plant reproduction in the Central Amazonian floodplains
The Amazon is the greatest river system on the planet. Twenty per cent of the world’s freshwater enters the oceans through the river basin. It’s an immense amount of water, but the flow isn’t constant...
