Growth & Development - Botany One (Page 12)

Feral Wheat as a motorcyclist riding into town, or rather field, with some attractive genes.

Feral Crops: The Untapped Potential to Boost Food Security Amid Climate Change

Scientists are exploring a new way to improve food security in the face of climate change by studying “feral crops” – wild plants that have escaped cultivation and continue to thrive without human intervention.

Alun Salt

16 Mar 2023

Stylised pseudo-botanical painting of buffalo grass on the prarie.

Growth & Development

Clonal Plants Use Smart Connections to Boost Resistance Against Hungry Insects

Plants that can reproduce by cloning themselves can share resources and signals to resist herbivores. Clones can change the structure of their leaves according to herbivore stress through the connections between them.

Alun Salt

15 Mar 2023

Growth & Development

What lies beneath? Botanists find a disconnection between how plants behave above and below ground.

Do plants invest more in a live-fast and die-young strategy, or take it slow and steady? Botanists have found that the appearance above the ground might not reflect what’s happening in the roots.

Alun Salt

28 Jan 2023

Ecosystems

Missing seed data from the tropics could be harming conservation efforts

Visscher and colleagues propose that global analyses of seed traits with evidence for geographical variation prioritize the generation of new data from tropical regions as well as multi-lingual searches to fill geographical and taxonomic gaps.

Alun Salt

25 Jan 2023