Reviews
Crime Scene Botanics, the forensic side of botany
Planting Clues should not only appeal to the general reader, but will also serve well as a textbook for an undergraduate course on forensic botany.
Plants & People
Meet our new Science Editors : Michela and Guillaume
Welcome to two editors who will expand Botany One’s horizons.
Close Encounters
Fungi prepare the soil for plant invasions
Chinese researchers find that similar plants can gain a big competitive advantage by partnering with the right fungi.
Taxonomy & Evolution
Pansies undergo high-speed evolution when pollinators disappear
French researchers used ‘resurrection ecology’ to compare 2012 pansies with plants from twenty years earlier to see the evolutionary changes in the flowers over time.
Cells, Genes & Molecules
Increased soybean yields finally achieved
Bioengineering boosts photosynthesis and increases yields in food crops for the first time ever.
Plants & People
Winter is coming, and that’s bad news for food security
Two recent papers take different approaches to the potentially disastrous consequences of loading the stratosphere with ash but combined, they act as a warning for the fragility of food security.
Ecosystems
It’s not too late to save the carnivorous plants of Janggun wetland
Surveys of Janggun wetland in South Korea have found some parts have no carnivorous plants, but a study of the seed bank shows that they have the potential to return if the wetland is managed correctly.
Plants & People
Ecologists discover a place for the dead in graveyards
It was thought that people preferred graveyards to be tidy. A new survey finds that visitors can accept the presence of some decaying matter – opening more possibilities for biodiversity.
Close Encounters
Bromeliads offer ants a summer residence in Costa Rica
Myrmecophobes might want to avoid studying bromeliads in the forests of Costa Rica during the summer. There are plenty of plants, but they seem to attract fire ants.
Cells, Genes & Molecules
Connecting rhythmic gene circuits to metabolism explains the slow growth rate of a slow-clock mutant
A model designed to study circadian effects on physiology becomes more broadly useful when the clock regulates metabolites.
Cells, Genes & Molecules
Photosynthesis on the far side of the rainbow
Light you cannot see, in the infrared part of the spectrum, is surprisingly important for plant photosynthesis.
Close Encounters
Which ornamental plants perform best for pollinators?
Guides suggest some species are better than others for pollinators, but when you get to the plant nursery you’re confronted by half a dozen cultivars of the same species. How do you pick between them?