Dearest TWiB Readers,

We hope you're enjoying our featured articles on Digital Botany. Week 2 has just been published and Week 3 starts today, when we'll be showcasing the relationship between specimens, art and culture.

Today, read an in-depth interview with Dr. Barnabas Daru on the exciting research opportunities herbarium collections offer. Tomorrow, learn about Faith Fyles, who worked from 1911-1931 for the Canadian Department of Agriculture as a botanist and artist. And on Friday, unravel the connections between plant and humans with a look at the ethnobotanical collection of the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden in Brazil. Plus, we will have our regular posts on topics of interest such as "The Plants Closest to Extinction Are the Ones Science Often Knows Least" and "Scaled Gardeners: How Fish Dictate the Future of the Amazonian Flooded Forest", which will publish throughout the week.

This past Saturday brought the return of Sudoku Garden. In it, we pay tribute to the immense contributions of Peter Raven to the Missouri Botanical Garden and the global plant science community. He sadly passed away earlier this year. The Sudoku marks what would have been his 90th birthday on 13th June. We also jump on the World Cup bandwagon with Plant Hunt, looking at the World coming to North America.

Below, we share the latest Botany One stories, botanical news, conversations from Mastodon and Bluesky and career postings.

Until next time,

Sarah (webmaster@botany.one)

On Botany One

Digital Botany Focus Issue Week 2:

Heather Cole: Best Tricks, Equipment and Software for Digitisation
Everyone knows that it is important to have the right tools for the job, whether collecting plants in the field for scientific research or cooking them in the kitchen for dinner. The same is true for digitisation: converting physical objects into data and images which can be stored digitally. In
Botany OneMagda Upton
Lights, Camera, Action! Behind the lens of Kew’s mass herbarium digitisation project
Anyone with a smartphone probably has a camera roll of images waiting to be sorted through. Now imagine you have millions of images to process, and associated data to manage, and some of them include labels handwritten with a quavering hand by candlelight over 200 years ago by a botanist
Botany OneMagda Upton
Three Tools That Bring Digital Botany Within Reach
Millions of herbarium specimens are now only a click away. But how do botanists find the right records, sort the right images and train better AI tools? Three digital botany tools are helping turn online collections into usable knowledge.
Botany OneCarlos A. Ordóñez-Parra

Plant of the Week:

Turfgrass
From golf to tennis to football, turfgrass is specially bred for a variety of sports
Botany OneSarah Covshoff

There was also last week's Week in Botany, with Week 1 of Digital Botany, fragrant libraries and the effect of urban heat on lichens and bryophytes.

Sudoku Garden is back, with a tribute to the legacy of Peter Raven.

In AoBC Publications

News & Views

Robert Ricklefs – in memoriam
Robert Ricklefs, a giant of ecology, passed away on Sunday. It is hard to overstate the extensive impact Bob had on the field. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the US,….
Dynamic Ecology
How to Create a Firefly Oasis - UF/IFAS Extension Polk County
With firefly populations declining due to habitat loss and decreasing dark spaces, here is how to create a firefly oasis near your home.
UF/IFAS Extension Polk County
A disease of deforestation: how Ebola is linked to the smartphone in your pocket
As demand for cobalt, gold and other minerals grows, mining is accelerating deforestation in the Congo basin – and increasing the risk of deadly Ebola outbreaks.
The Guardian

Science Shared

Three botany papers widely shared on Bluesky this past week were:

  1. Conserved TIR-only proteins drive transcriptional defense and basal immunity in dicot and monocot plantshe controls that got out of control 🆓
    Laessle, H. et al. · bioRxiv
  2. Chromosome gigantism and auxin deconjugation underpin gall induction in a horned gall aphid 🆓
    Qin Lu et al. · bioRxiv
  3. Rational design of T-DNA vectors enables predictable, single-copy integration in Arabidopsis thaliananticipate, acclimate, recuperate and remember: How spatiotemporal signal integration controls flooding stress resilience in plants 🆓
    Shaw, W. M. et al. · bioRxiv

You can see the top 20 with more details at Science Shared: June 13.

Careers on Bluesky

Please note these are not jobs I am offering. Nor can I help you with any visa requirements. At time of writing there are around 100 other jobs posted at Botany One.

Vacancies | Working Here | What We Do
The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) needs keen and enthusiastic individuals to support the Garden’s mission to explore, conserve and explain the world of plants for a better future.
gb rbge.org.uk
Postdoctoral Associate - Seed Biology and Technology Program, Ithaca, NY
This position will support research on seed-applied, non-neonicotinoid protection strategies targeting early-season crop pests including Delia spp. in New York cropping systems.
us Cornell University
PhD Position in Soil Science & Agroforestry, University of Göttingen
Apply for a fully funded PhD Candidate position in Soil Science and Agroforestry at the University of Göttingen, Germany.
de Agristok

Cover Image: Faith Fyles’s illustration of Canada moonseed, a toxic climbing plant often mistaken for wild grape as seen in her book Principal Poisonous Plants of Canada published in 1920. Source: BHL via Flickr (Public Domain). – Alisa Abramovich, from her upcoming article "Hidden Stories in Collections: How Art and Science Come Together after Digitisation".