Botany One

From golf to tennis to football, turfgrass is specially bred for a variety of sports

The world is coming to North America this month for a celebration. Tempting as it is to offer a plant hunt with nearly identical species of grass for the tournament, I thought to do something else. Each plant hunt will cover species that have come to North America to add to its culture. This sounded like a fun idea. This week it's Africa. Africa has given a lot to North America, but it would also…

This week: plant immunity, gall production, and improvements to Agrobacterium-mediated plant transformation.

Today would have been Peter Raven’s 90th birthday. Sadly he passed away earlier this year, but his legacy is still with us. It sounds like a very AI sentence, but it’s a bit difficult to write briefly about his achievements without being a bit overwhelmed. For example, take his role at Missouri Botanical Garden. He became director there at the age of 35. One reason he could do that is that it was…

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.

State flowers and insects are meant to represent a place, but climate change may soon test how long those living emblems can remain in place.

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

A new method reveals that developing barley seeds run their own form of photosynthesis, distinct from the familiar process in leaves.

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

Once known from only two sites in Brazil’s rocky Cerrado highlands, Vellozia sessilis is now helping show how fieldwork and citizen science can protect microendemic plants.

Here's a round up of the top 20 papers you've been sharing this week on Bluesky. Papers behind a paywall are marked 💰otherwise they're free to access at time of checking. How this works We scan posts by people on the Botany Auto list and pull out the entries with links to papers. Every time a paper gets a post written about it it gets 4 points. It gets 3 points for a repost and 1 point for a like…

Here's a round up of the top 20 papers you've been sharing this week on Bluesky. Papers behind a paywall are marked 💰otherwise they're free to access at time of checking. How this works We scan posts by people on the Botany Auto list and pull out the entries with links to papers. Every time a paper gets a post written about it it gets 4 points. It gets 3 points for a repost and 1 point for a like…

Natural history collections are historical repositories brimming with potential. Not only are plant and fungal specimens fundamental to scientific research, but they also give us insights into the places, people, and times involved in their collection. Thanks to worldwide digitisation efforts, we now have more power to detangle these stories

Lichens and mosses may act as living sensors of urban warming, helping researchers understand how rising city temperatures alter biodiversity at the smallest scales.

As crop collections become increasingly digital, EURISCO shows why conserving plant diversity means managing not only seeds, but also the data that give them meaning.

Could perfumes help save endangered plants? A new initiative combines fragrance technology, conservation funding, and ethical sourcing to protect some of the world’s rarest species.

Before a plant becomes a digital record, it passes through the hands of collectors, taxonomists and curators. Scientists across Latin America reveal why turning specimens into data is part detective work, part history, and part botanical adventure.

During unprecedented times of plant extinctions, AI-generated weblogs, and not always knowing what to believe online, Botany One is embarking on a mission with our first Special Focus Issue on Digital Botany. We will be publishing three articles per week, focusing on Digital Botany throughout June. We worked together with the community to commission 12 articles from 8 writers, supported by one Gu…

The capim-brinco-de-princesa brings together the beauty of the dry-season Cerrado, community seed collection and a new vision for native landscaping.

This week: selective autophagy, maize flowering, water-potential sensing, and much more.