#FF is a common tag on Twitter. It means FollowFriday. The idea is that you tweet the handles of a few people that you thing others should follow. We’re doing something a bit different. We follow a lot of accounts on Twitter, over two and half thousand at the moment. That’s a lot of tweets to read. What I’m doing as an experiment is seeing what gets shared the most and highlighting that. You’ll see the stories below and the accounts that shared them. If you see people sharing things you find interesting or helpful, those are the people you should follow.

We’ll start with five stories shared this week.

1. Seed Free Plants at the Genomic Scale

https://twitter.com/LilyRobertLewis/status/760886606983208960

There’s a problem with tweeting a conference. You get a sense of immediacy when it’s live, but quickly it can become difficult to keep track of what’s going on. Tweets disappear into the stream. Matt Johnson @mossmatters has done an excellent job of pulling tweets on the recent colloquium at Botany 2016: Seed Free Plants at the Genomic Scale. Storify allows you to embed tweets, photos, links and text into one page as a narrative. It needs a bit more than just chucking tweets at a page, and Matt has done a great job at pulling a series of papers that could have got lost under the Botany 2016 hashtag into focus.

Sharers: MossMatters, ebsessa, uribe_convers, MossPlants, BortEdwards, profmcmanus, bryomedina, LilyRobertLewis

2. How millions of trees brought a broken landscape back to life

If you live in the UK, you might not know there’s a National Forest. There are signs on the M1, but not many trees. However, John Vidal reports for the Observer that the trees that have been planted are helping restore a landscape blighted by opencast mining. It’s not a problem limited to Leicestershire. Spiegel Online reports (in English) on how East Germany’s former mines are being landscaped to improve the environment. What you can do with mined land does vary with the state of the mineworks.