Plants are green or not green, small or tall, beautiful or irritating, rare or everywhere. Plants grow happily without us, but our lives depend on them. On “Fascination of Plants Day” on 18th May 2017, we take a moment to appreciate plants for their diversity, beauty and importance in our lives. As scientists, we share what fascinates us about plants, and what drives our curiosity to delve deeper into their lives.
Launching ‘Botany Live’
We want the whole world to know about the fascination of plants. Therefore, we are launching ‘Botany Live’, an online science communication initiative for Fascination of Plants Day 2017 (FoPD). For this, we are asking scientists, science communicators, educators and anyone who feels passionate about plants to live-stream a short peek into their lives. ’Botany Live’ will take place from 18th – 21st May (Thursday – Sunday) 2017. This means that you will be able to capture activities during the week and normal work hours, as well as special FoPD events on the weekend.
Our aims are to engage new audiences that do not live near a University or Botanic Garden and would find it hard otherwise to participate in activities on the day. Of course, we also want to reach existing followers of plant science social media accounts, and to expand the global reach of FoPD. Finally, this will be a great opportunity to explore live-streaming as new science communication tool. We are now looking for people to contribute, and to help us make plants ‘go viral’!
How to participate!
You can participate in ‘Botany Live’ by running a live-stream session, using the free app ‘Periscope’. Live sessions could be a tour through a lab, herbarium, field site, a walk through a Botanic Garden, a behind-the-scenes tour of places that usually aren’t open to the public, interviews, a reportage from a FoPD event, an ‘experiment-along’… There is no limit to your creativity, but we recommend that your session should be short – between 5 and 15 minutes.
We will curate a central website (to be launched soon), . On this site, we will promote the schedule of all announced live sessions in the run-up to the event, and will pull together all content from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram posted under the hashtag #BotanyLive to be displayed on it. We will also provide an archive of all content as a legacy. For this, we will ask you to send us URLs of your video, if you uploaded it you your organisation’s website or social media channel. Alternatively, we will be able to upload your video for you in a special ‘Botany Live’ YouTube channel.
Please email us at webmaster@botany.one for a link to the Google form, in which you can register your live-stream session.
You can download the call for contributions and additional guidance as PDF here: Botany Live Call and Guidance
The organising team
- Main contact: Anne Osterrieder (@AnneOsterrieder)
- Mary Williams (@PlantTeaching)
- Ian Street (@IHStreet)
- Alun Salt (@annbot)