featured
The Next Generation of Natural Historians
The Linnean Society held its second student conference last Friday, Student Spotlights 2020: Discover the next generation of natural historians. I had hoped to go to
featured
Plant blindness in smartphone identification applications – are we passing on our biases to our helpful apps?
It is well-known that people are better at identifying animals than plants and this relative inability of people to identify plants is increasingly termed “plant
Computational Models
A new whole-plant framework simulates realistic water and carbon flow
CPlantBox generates a variety of 3D full plant architectures and accurately simulates water and carbon flow in the full plant.
Ecosystems
Resource allocation trade-offs in a mast-seeding conifer
Three key functions are required for the long-term persistence of tree populations in a landscape. Broadly speaking, trees must acquire and allocate resources to maintain
Close Encounters
How does partnership work for a lichen in the Antarctic?
Lichens are partnerships between algae and fungi. In the Antarctic Lichens offer algae shelter against the cold, but also an uncertain future.
featured
Plant Records : the (very, very, very) old pine tree
How old is OLD?
Cells, Genes & Molecules
How important is meat to a curious carnivorous plant?
Drosophyllum lusitanicum, also known as the Portuguese sundew or dewy pine, is unusual even for carnivorous plants in that it lives in dry environments. Typically, carnivorous plants live in nutrient-poor wetlands, so does it really gain much from carnivory?
featured
Tackling plant blindness: Botany by stealth…
School lessons devoted to plants may be off-putting to those students who are already plant-averse. So, why not smuggle bits of plant information into lessons on topics as diverse as Geography, History, Art & Design, and Computing to show how relevant plants are?
featured
BioGO, a treasure hunt to teach biology
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.
featured
StomaToy — Learning Plant Defence Through Play
Stomata are necessary for photosynthesis, but they’re also access points for pathogens. How do plants defend them?
featured
We asked the members of the in silico Plants editorial board what they do to achieve work/life balance.
This is what they said:
annals-of-botany
A fern thought to grow on trees still keeps a root on the ground
The Aspleniaceae is a family of ferns, some of which are terrestrial and some of which are epiphytes. A new study has found a rarity, a hemiepiphyte.