Our videoblog discusses plants in the family Proteaceae, a well-known Southern hemisphere family with many beautiful and well-known representatives in Africa and Australia. The striking red flowers of the genus Leucospermum, from South Africa feature on the cover of the Annals of Botany for this year. Banksia is a well-known Australian genus, the bottle brush [...]
Plants have always attracted human interest as evolving structures, Leonardo da Vinci’s studies on trees as an early example. Today not only intellectual curiosity but also increasing pressures on vegetation management (e.g. food security, biodiversity conservation, and control of global green house gas cycles) call for integrating all aspects of plants into models. Leonardo considered [...]
Many phytoplankton share a common feature with their larger non-aquatic cousins, the land plants: chloroplasts. Therefore they are also united in their ability to photosynthesize and their environmental requirement of sunlight. Phytoplankton occupy the surface waters of our oceans where sunlight can penetrate. They account for more photosynthesis, carbon dioxide fixation and oxygen production than [...]
We have a new special issue out on Plant Mating Systems, with a couple of free access posts. Gynodioecy to dioecy: are we there yet? by Rachel B. Spigler and Tia-Lynn Ashman is a review of the evolution of sexes and sexual strategies in plants. The natural history of pollination and mating in bird-pollinated Babiana [...]
Valentine’s Day is here and unless you share the cynics’ view that this is a holiday invented by the flower industry, you might set off to buy a bunch of flowers for your other half on the day. Next time, why not do something completely different this year and create your own unique flowers? 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 [...]