COVID-19 forced many academics to teach remotely; for field botany this required a complete rethink of how such a course could be taught.
Continue reading Can field botany be effectively taught as a distance course?
Plant identification apps are now widely available for smartphones but can we trust them for research and nature conservation purposes?
Continue reading Flora Incognita shows high identification accuracy in Northern Europe
Can smartphone apps successfully identify British native flora?
Continue reading What plant is that? Testing out automated plant identification apps
It’s hard for students to do their own thing on an introductory course, when you have an intake of hundreds. The easy way is to rely on lectures, but at the Université catholique de Louvain, they do things differently.
Continue reading BioGO, a treasure hunt to teach biology
Ian Street finds your phone is getting ever more powerful, with a species recognition app.
Continue reading iNaturalist: An App to Ease Plant Blindness
First came Flora Novae Angliae, the definitive manual for the identification of native and naturalized vascular plants of New England. Now comes the website with thousands of full-color images and illustrations for teaching and learning botany. Dr Elizabeth Farnsworth has told us about the New England Wild Flower Society’s announcement of the first stage of Go Botany, the Society’s exciting, new open source website that teaches botany and plant identification, is now online. She writes “Imagine a field guide at your fingertips that can help you learn about the native and naturalized plants of New England! Maybe you’re a teacher looking...
Continue reading Go Botany – Plant identification on a computer or tablet near you
If you thought that acquiring the expertise to identify plants took many years of application, you’d be wrong. Now – apparently – it takes only one application (or ‘app’ in modern parlance). Or such seems to be the intention behind Leafsnap, the first in a planned series of electronic field guides being developed by researchers from Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution in the USA. Using software originally developed to recognise human faces, the ‘app’ (which is free!) identifies tree species from photographs of their leaves. In addition to an identification, Leafsnap provides photographs and information...
Continue reading iPhone 4 ID? OMG!Botany One is a blog run by the Annals of Botany Company, a non-profit educational charity.
In addition to Botany One, the company currently publishes three journals, the Annals of Botany, AoB PLANTS, and in silico Plants.
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