How will coastal ecosystems change when some seedling can tolerate rising tides, and others cannot?
Category - Ecosystems
William Salter
Risk-takers and risk-avoiders: germination sensitivity to water stress in an arid zone with unpredictable rainfall
How much water does it take to turn an arid land into a hotbed of new life?
Thermal acclimation of plant respiration is tissue type specific
Carbon released from the land surface is one of the largest fluxes of carbon dioxide (CO2) between the atmosphere and the Earth’s surface, with plant respiration accounting for about half of this flux. As a result...
Drought tolerance strategies of conifer species in the northwestern US
As trees photosynthesize, using carbon from the atmosphere to grow and store energy, they also lose water to the air (transpire). During a drought, continuing to photosynthesize and transpire puts trees at risk of...
How important is meat to a curious carnivorous plant?
Drosophyllum lusitanicum, also known as the Portuguese sundew or dewy pine, is unusual even for carnivorous plants in that it lives in dry environments. Typically, carnivorous plants live in nutrient-poor wetlands, so...
Alun Salt
The mountains are getting warmer, and willow colonies are shrinking
Salix herbacea, as other arctic-alpine species, likely found a refuge from the Ice Age in the Apennines. As the climate changed around them, the trees survived in a fragmenting population. This fragmentation has genetic...
A warming Antarctic is changing how mosses have sex
Mosses are reacting to rising temperatures in the Antarctic in different ways. The tiny plants could cause big changes to the food web.
Dale Maylea
Invasion strategies in clonal aquatic plants
Invasion strategies in clonal aquatic plants The successful spread of invasive plants is often linked to a diverse gene pool that facilitates local adaptation to variable environmental conditions: but what about clonal...
botanyone
How old is my meadow?
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...
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...
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