Botany One

This week we look at Asian plants that have been welcomed into North America. This week proved a bit of a challenge as a few of the plants aren't really found in the wild. If your favourite Asian plant isn't in this list, we may have it later into the series. How to Play Plant Hunt is a game of memory. The goal is to match all the cards in the shortest number of time and attempts. You uncover car…

This week: debris for diversity, attack and defence in pathogens, and getting your statistics right.

The past few gardens have has a sad theme for the generator seed. This week it's the weekend of the solstice. If you live in the Northern Hemisphere you have the longest days, and lazy summer evenings. If you live in the better hemisphere, then you can look forward to the dark nights fleeing and spring returning. For plants the solstice might well be a useful signal. The photoperiod, the period w…

The online mobilisation of digital collections has made tens of millions of specimens accessible for scientific research, helping discoveries in conservation, food security, and biodiversity studies. Many of these projects focus on questions such as extinction risks, improving estimates of plant distributions across space and time, and conservation planning for threatened species. But digitisatio…

We often think of herbaria as a scientific resource used by researchers to study plant taxonomy, evolution, conservation and climate change, perhaps. But herbarium collections are also full of human stories. They hold traces of collectors, artists, gardeners, botanists, places, journeys and changing relationships between people, plants and nature. Digitisation

New research shows that economic value, not conservation urgency, is the strongest predictor of which Brazilian plants attract scientific study.

Digital botany is changing what we can ask of old collections. Herbarium specimens, once used mainly for taxonomy and identification, are now helping researchers study evolution, species distributions, environmental change, and conservation priorities at a global scale. To explore that shift, Botany One interviewed Dr. Barnabas Daru, Assistant Professor of

From golf to tennis to football, turfgrass is specially bred for a variety of sports

The world is coming to North America this month for a celebration. Tempting as it is to offer a plant hunt with nearly identical species of grass for the tournament, I thought to do something else. Each plant hunt will cover species that have come to North America to add to its culture. This sounded like a fun idea. This week it's Africa. Africa has given a lot to North America, but it would also…

This week: plant immunity, gall production, and improvements to Agrobacterium-mediated plant transformation.

Today would have been Peter Raven’s 90th birthday. Sadly he passed away earlier this year, but his legacy is still with us. It sounds like a very AI sentence, but it’s a bit difficult to write briefly about his achievements without being a bit overwhelmed. For example, take his role at Missouri Botanical Garden. He became director there at the age of 35. One reason he could do that is that it was…

Millions of herbarium specimens are now only a click away. But how do botanists find the right records, sort the right images and train better AI tools? Three digital botany tools are helping turn online collections into usable knowledge.

State flowers and insects are meant to represent a place, but climate change may soon test how long those living emblems can remain in place.

Anyone with a smartphone probably has a camera roll of images waiting to be sorted through. Now imagine you have millions of images to process, and associated data to manage, and some of them include labels handwritten with a quavering hand by candlelight over 200 years ago by a botanist

A new method reveals that developing barley seeds run their own form of photosynthesis, distinct from the familiar process in leaves.

Everyone knows that it is important to have the right tools for the job, whether collecting plants in the field for scientific research or cooking them in the kitchen for dinner. The same is true for digitisation: converting physical objects into data and images which can be stored digitally. In

Once known from only two sites in Brazil’s rocky Cerrado highlands, Vellozia sessilis is now helping show how fieldwork and citizen science can protect microendemic plants.

Here's a round up of the top 20 papers you've been sharing this week on Bluesky. Papers behind a paywall are marked 💰otherwise they're free to access at time of checking. How this works We scan posts by people on the Botany Auto list and pull out the entries with links to papers. Every time a paper gets a post written about it it gets 4 points. It gets 3 points for a repost and 1 point for a like…

Here's a round up of the top 20 papers you've been sharing this week on Bluesky. Papers behind a paywall are marked 💰otherwise they're free to access at time of checking. How this works We scan posts by people on the Botany Auto list and pull out the entries with links to papers. Every time a paper gets a post written about it it gets 4 points. It gets 3 points for a repost and 1 point for a like…

Natural history collections are historical repositories brimming with potential. Not only are plant and fungal specimens fundamental to scientific research, but they also give us insights into the places, people, and times involved in their collection. Thanks to worldwide digitisation efforts, we now have more power to detangle these stories