We put The natural history of pollination and mating in bird-pollinated Babiana (Iridaceae) live on the Annals of Botany site this week. It’s been covered in the press, notably by the BBC, Plant has evolved a...
Category - News
Alun Salt
Rice finally makes impact!
The Springer-published, peer-reviewed, economically entitled research journal Rice, which is devoted to… err… rice, has received its first Impact Factor (a metric by which journals are evaluated and ranked – rightly or...
Nigel Chaffey
Big (and I mean GINORMOUS) new journal
Science has always been a ‘big’ topic – and not just those terrabucks physics projects – it asks some of the biggest questions of all: who are we? why are we here? why are you reading this? But, as technology has...
Barcode Wales
No, this has nothing to do with whales (they’re fish-like denizens of the deep, and has probably already been done by some countries under the guise of ‘scientific whaling’ anyway…). Nor is it a strange and unusual...
dubius research that blows you away
Elegant research should always be applauded (or publicised, which is what I’m doing here!). And they don’t come more elegant than David Greene and Mauricio Quesada’s seminal study entitled ‘The differential effect of...
Darwin’s doodles digitised
Darwin’s doodles digitised Were you told not to ‘scribble’ in books as a child? I was. And I obeyed. But as I get older and more inclined to forget what I’ve read, I tend to add marginal notes in books, on articles, etc...
Convoluted carbon cycle collection
Of all the biogeochemical cycles that help to sustain life on Earth, the carbon cycle is arguably the most important (although not necessarily the most straightforward!). The following collection of papers help to...
Hot Bot…
Botany is officially ‘hot’ (or even ‘really cool’…), according to no less a publication than the FT (Financial Times) Magazine, where Clive Cookson lists ‘plants to feed the world’ amongst his ‘Science’s 10 hottest...
Plants: where to draw the line? (or, ICBN rules, OK!?)
For years we can be happy using a word and thinking we know what it means, and presuming that everybody else also understands it in the same way. Well, what about the word ‘plants’? I realise I’m probably addressing...
Inspirational plants
Wikimedia Commons. Plants supply us – and other organisms – with many solid resources, e.g. food, medicines, shelter, drinks. Something that is more intangible – but no less important for that – is the inspiration...
…this month’s most tenuous plant link?
Warning for the zoophobic: this item is about Caenorhabditis elegans – a free-living, transparent nematode {‘roundworm’ –sometimes known as ‘the Arabidopsis of animal biology’ [that’s Arabidopsis (frequently described...
Bigging up botany
Scott Bauer, USDA ARS. It being such a rare TV event these days, I have to ensure that everybody is aware of the recent series on BBC4 (a digital channel from the UK’s British Broadcasting Corporation), Botany: A...
Botanists and plants solving the problems of the world at #IBC18
The programme at #IBC18 shows how botanical science has moved forward at an unprecedented rate since IBC17 in 2005. Not only has the science advanced, but the critical importance of plants to the world has been seen...
Editor Pat Heslop-Harrison
Ecosystems, services and understanding human-environment relations
Ecosystem services are not a meaningful framework of interpretation of human-environment relations for the vast majority of people, although the term has gained traction in science and policy. Culturally the concepts...
Guest Author