Most international archaeological work in South America has concentrated on the Andes for various reasons. It’s more accessible, the ruins are more visible, there’s a better ethnohistorical record from the conquistadors, there’s variety over short distances because change in height makes vertical economies possible where different foods grow at different heights and they’re just the [...]

Palms may be the most useful group of plants in tropical American forests and in this project we study the effect of extraction and trade of palms on forests in the western Amazon, Andes, and Pacific lowlands of South America. In 2008 the European Community’s 7th Framework programme signed a contract with six European and [...]

How can you say something is historically important or not unless you observe it? What happens if you set up conditions where you intentionally cannot observe a site’s historical importance? I said in the opening post that some sites might have been chosen as a deliberate trolling for comment, and I think the Svalbard Global [...]

It’s easy to pin scientific credit on a person. He or she usually has a name on the key publication, but how do you credit a place? Science is a human activity, so is it just the humans that matter or are there things were place contributes as much as people? While I was kicking [...]

General Perspective During the 20th Century national, regional and international gene banks established major collections for most crops to ensure the conservation of plant genetic resources. However, the use of this crop genetic endowment remains limited due to the lack of systematic research to provide a comprehensive framework for the efficient identification and introgression of [...]

TIME has recently published 100 greatest places in the world. The book is a collection of sites that, the editors argue, have had the biggest impact on world history. It’s excellent blog material because hardly anyone has read it (including me), any list will be personal and omit something someone feels is important and, following [...]

Global agriculture is facing major challenges to ensure global food security, such as the need to breed high-yielding crops adapted to future climates and the identification of dedicated feedstock crops for biofuel production (biofuel feedstocks). Plant phenomics offers a suite of new technologies to accelerate progress in understanding gene function and environmental responses. This will [...]

Waiting for ages for a bus to come along only for two to arrive at once is guaranteed to raise a frown, or worse. But, in this instance, two buses together are having a quite different effect. The buses concerned are two back-to-back ‘Letters’ that appeared on October 23 2011 in the journal Nature (Licausi [...]

This article provides an overview of the development and structure of spore and pollen walls in the major plant groups and summarises progress in our understanding of the molecular genetics underpinning spore/pollen evolution and development.

The rate of molecular evolution of Tricyrtis plant groups as a model system was estimated. The outcome further highlights the importance of conserving biodiversity in a rapidly changing Earth environment. This phylogenetic analyses of Tricyrtis with its high endemism in north-east Asia sheds light on processes of speciation processes.