The Week in Botany September 7, 2026

There's some bad news this week. Dr Jonathan Mitchley, of Reading, has died. Among older academics he might be best known for his work on grasses, including restoring grasslands. For a lot of younger botanists he's going to be remembered as Dr M, one of the wizards behind Botanical University Challenge, and the Student Festival of Botany. Last week on the site I put up The brain does plant science, but the heart moves the body, and I think his infectious enthusiasm is as good an example as you could hope to find of someone who could capture the emotion that drives people to do science. He's going to be deeply missed.

If you're interested in making a difference and inspiring others, the deadline for the Chief Editor position for in silico Plants has yet to pass. It's a huge opportunity to help get good science to a wider audience. The position is open worldwide.

This week I aim to start filming for the video project. I'll write up something about that closer to launch as video brings opportunities but also potential problems. I also have a lot of text to edit so there'll be plenty to read on site this month as well. On top of that, there will also be another email sharing what we've posted as well as the stories you're sharing on Mastodon and Bluesky, and career postings at the usual time next week.

Until then, take care,

Alun (webmaster@botany.one)

On Botany One

How Can Overlooked Plants Help Rebuild Ecosystems Transformed by Mining?
Recovery after mining may begin close to the ground, with mosses and liverworts helping new ecosystems take shape.

Edel Pérez-López: Fighting Plant Diseases with Genomics and AI
Botany One interviews Dr Edel Pérez-López, a researcher combining plant pathology, genomics and artificial intelligence to develop more resilient crops and sustainable disease management.

Is the Presence of Invasive Seaweed Positive or Negative for Ecosystem Functions?
In the warming Mediterranean, invasive seaweeds may help replace some ecological functions lost as native species decline, revealing a more complex side of marine bioinvasions.

There was also Science Shared, Sudoku Garden celebrated hummingbirds, and Ballantinia pumilio was plant of the week. You can also see last week's Week in Botany too.

In AoBC Publications

• Functional traits reveal unaccounted diversity within Sonchus asper (L.) Hill (Asteraceae) in the northern Mediterranean and enable the reinstatement of ancient taxa 🆓
• Impacts of climate-driven loss of giant kelp forests on local dive tourism 🆓
• Island-wide population genomic analysis of the coastal shrub, beach naupaka (Scaevola taccada L.), on Oʻahu 🆓
  

News & Views

UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke to combine herbaria, creating the third-largest university plant collection in the United States
UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University will unite their herbaria under the management of the North Carolina Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill.
ncbg.unc.edu

Proving extinction is hard. But we can do so now.
For decades, climate change ecology has mostly been a story about shifts: species moving upslope, poleward, tracking the climate they’re adapted to as it slides out from under them. It’s one of the best-documented fingerprints of warming in nature. What we’ve been much worse at showing is what happens at the far end of these shifts: actual extinction.
the3dlab.org

CAM! An Enlightening Discussion with Karolina Heyduk - A Botanical Podcast
Host Shiran Ben-Zeev talks with Dr. Karolina Heyduk, University of Connecticut, about why she and her colleagues and students sometimes have slumber parties with (very special) plants.
buzzsprout.com

Obituary - Jonathan Mitchley Dr M the singing botanist
The University community was very sorry to hear of the sudden death this week of Dr Jonathan Mitchley, Associate Professor of Field Botany in the School of Biological Sciences.
reading.ac.uk

Almost half of world’s farmers poisoned by pesticides every year, experts find
Study reveals that pesticide poisoning kills 11,000 people each year, with India accounting for nearly 60% of fatalities.
theguardian.com

Wattle Day - Wattle Day
National Wattle Day is a formally proclaimed national day on 1 September. Today it is a unifying day to celebrate Australia and being Australian.
wattleday.asn.au

Botanical Photographer of the Year
Our photographic competition aims to highlight and celebrate the dazzling visual world of Britain and Ireland's wild plants, and the botanists who are interested in them.
bsbi.org

Going belowground in search of Oxalis
Sometimes looking belowground can bring us to amazing places. I recently visited Florianópolis, Brazil to meet Pedro Fiaschi, expert in Oxalis taxonomy and professor at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, and to see the Oxalis plants growing around the area.
plantlifebelowground.wordpress.com

Could an Australian banana prevent a global crop collapse?
Australia's first genetically modified banana has been tweaked to protect it from a disease that's on the verge of wiping out crops around the world. Researchers hope it may be on our shelves by 2027.
abc.net.au

The Garden You Choose: A Post-PhD Career Guide for Plant Scientists | Plantae
You finish high school, then a bachelor’s degree, then a master’s, and eventually a PhD. Each step can feel like the natural continuation of the one before it.
plantae.org

Science Shared

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

1. Progressive oxygenation of developing leaves directs morphogenesis
Panicucci, G. et al. · Science Advances · 2 posts · 84 likes · 41 reposts on Bluesky

Here, we show that developing leaves form a spatiotemporal oxygen gradient that is sensed through the oxygen-sensing machinery. This pathway integrates local oxygen availability to regulate leaf morphogenesis: Early hypoxia restricts cell expansion, whereas subsequent distal-to-proximal oxygenation depletes group VII ethylene response factors enabling specialized cell-fate acquisition and controlling proliferation.

2. Recent high-severity wildfires in a dry-conifer landscape are unprecedented over five centuries and foretell future forest loss
Wion, A. P. et al. · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 1 post · 55 likes · 23 reposts on Bluesky

To what extent do modern high-severity fires depart from pre-1900 fire regimes, and how do these departures affect the future persistence of dry-conifer forests? We address these questions using a multiscalar approach that combines the largest landscape-scale tree-ring fire-scar network in North America with neutral landscape model simulations in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico.

Discussed on Bluesky by @grumpyunclesean.bsky.social.

3. A genomic catalog of Earth’s bacterial and archaeal symbionts
Villada, J. C. et al. · Nature Biotechnology · 1 post · 31 likes · 17 reposts on Bluesky

This study used machine learning (ML) to predict symbiotic lifestyles in more than a hundred thousand microbial genomes from diverse environmental metagenome samples and reference genomes. Predictions were performed using symclatron, an ML framework developed to identify genomic signatures of symbionts.

You can see the full list with more details at Science Shared: August 29.

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 130 other jobs posted at Botany One.

Cover Image: Pérez-López recording an interview in the greenhouse. Photo by Edel Pérez-López.