By: JulieF,
on 8/14/2015
Many of us involved in teaching botany feel a sense of urgency in our profession. Botany departments, botany majors, and botany curricula have gradually disappeared from most colleges and universities in the US,
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By: Suzie Eves,
on 6/8/2015
“In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love” (Alfred, Lord Tennyson), but he could have said the same for insects too. Male insects will be following the scent of females, looking for a partner, but not every female is what she seems to be. It might look like the orchid is getting some unwanted attention in the video below, but it’s actually the bee that’s the victim. The orchid has released complex scents to fool the bee into thinking it’s meeting a female.
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By: Alice,
on 5/23/2015
Hop (Humulus lupulus L.) is an essential ingredient for brewing beer, and contributes a characteristic bitterness, aroma, and fullness. However, during the Middle-Ages, various other herbs including Rhodomyrtus tomentosa and Salix subfragilis, had also been used for brewing beer in Europe.
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By: Abby,
on 3/30/2015
With playful and elegant prose, conservation biologist Hanson takes on something so small but so powerful: the mighty seed. What begins as an exasperated attempt to break open a seemingly impenetrable seed shell leads to an in-depth exploration of the origins, functions, and human exploitations of these incredible little vessels of life. Books mentioned in [...]
By: DanP,
on 10/18/2014
Biology Week is an annual celebration of the biological sciences that aims to inspire and engage the public in the wonders of biology. The Society of Biology created this awareness day in 2012 to give everyone the chance to learn and appreciate biology, the science of the 21st century, through varied, nationwide events. Our belief that access to education and research changes lives for the better naturally supports the values behind Biology Week, and we are excited to be involved in it year on year.
Biology, as the study of living organisms, has an incredibly vast scope. We’ve identified some key figures from the last couple of centuries who traverse the range of biology: from physiology to biochemistry, sexology to zoology. You can read their stories by checking out our Biology Week 2014 gallery below. These biologists, in various different ways, have had a significant impact on the way we understand and interact with biology today. Whether they discovered dinosaurs or formed the foundations of genetic engineering, their stories have plenty to inspire, encourage, and inform us.
If you’d like to learn more about these key figures in biology, you can explore the resources available on our Biology Week page, or sign up to our e-alerts to stay one step ahead of the next big thing in biology.
Headline image credit: Marie Stopes in her laboratory, 1904, by Schnitzeljack. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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By: Beth,
on 7/30/2014
Name: Leafsnap
Platform: iOS
Cost: Free
Leafsnap has languished for years on my phone. The app represents the sort of big audacious online project that we as librarians need to know about. Merging geographic location with image recognition, it combines reports from the field to produce an interactive electronic guide.
For the end user, Leafsnap is designed to make a “best guess” about the species of a plant, based on an image of a leaf you upload or input through the camera. I hadn’t been able to use it before last week. It’s limitation? Spearheaded by the Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution, Leafsnap is crowd-sourced, and a caveat warns that the database best reflects the northeasten U.S. for the time being (though there is a U.K. version, too). When I heard someone speculating about the name of a specific tree while I was in Massachusetts, I was happy to put the tool to work.
One word on technique: I had better success when I photographed and cropped around a leaf beforehand, and you will need a “true white” background — the reverse side of an index card works fine. The app converts your image into an “x ray” of the leaf, queries the database and returns with a series of options, all of which contain Leafsnaps as well as more holistic images of matching plants.
Using the apps involves creating an account in Leafsnap’s user-driven botanical database to track your scanning and positive identifications. Inside the app, you’re creating your own log book, marking each species with a swipe, with a geographic distribution as well.
The process of collecting and marking specimens can be addictive; even your most tender-hearted teen will respect the do-no-harm approach to nature the app represents. Within the database, the specimens link to the Encyclopedia of Life, another ambitious, crowd-sourced online project, and there’s an integrated program designed to improve your recognition skills.
It only occurred to me after the fact that leafsnap enables a twenty-first century manifestation of the very nineteenth century impulse for classification among amateur botanists. For contrast, you can see a digitized version of Emily Dickinson’s old school herbarium here.
Leafsnap offers a fun, mobile way to involve the natural world in your summer STEM programming. And while the geographic scope of the database might seem to limit its utility, I’ve found that it works just fine beyond the specified region.
Have a suggestion for App of the Week? Let us know. And find more great Apps in the YALSA Blog’s App of the Week Archive.
By: Mary Jo,
on 3/3/2014
A lively botanical excursion: from the world's largest pumpkin to a truly black petunia, this is a delightful romp through the world of plants. Books mentioned in this post A Garden of Marvels: How We... Ruth Kassinger Used Hardcover $21.00
By: Kirsty,
on 3/2/2014
Conservation physiology was first identified as an emerging discipline in a landmark paper by Wikelski and Cooke, published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution in 2006. They defined it as “the study of physiological responses of organisms to human alteration of the environment that might cause or contribute to population decline”. Although the case studies and examples presented by Wikelski and Cooke focused on wild animals, they indicated already that conservation physiology should be applicable to all taxa. With the launch of the journal Conservation Physiology – one year ago – this taxonomic inclusiveness was made more explicit, and the definition was broadened to “an integrative scientific discipline applying physiological concepts, tools and knowledge to characterizing biological diversity and its ecological implications; understanding and predicting how organisms, populations and ecosystems respond to environmental change and stressors; and solving conservation problems across the broad range of taxa (i.e. including microbes, plants and animals)”.
Although the definition of conservation physiology, and also the journal with the same name, covers in principle all taxa, plants (and also microbes, and among animals the invertebrates) are still clearly underrepresented. Of the 32 papers that were published in the journal in 2013, only three (9%) focussed on plants. This underrepresentation of plants, however, appears to be a general trend in conservation science, as the journal Conservation Biology had only ten out of 93 contributed papers (11%) focussing on plants in 2013. The journal Biological Conservation did a bit better with 59 out of 309 regular papers (19%) focussing on plants in 2013. Given the importance of plants as primary producers, which are indispensable for all other organisms, and the fact that 10,065 of the 21,286 species (47%) assessed by the IUCN Red List as globally threatened are plants, they clearly deserve more attention in the field of conservation physiology, and conservation science in general.
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Conservation science has many important, frequently intertwined, sub-disciplines, including among others conservation policy, conservation genetics and conservation physiology. The strength of physiology, and thus of conservation physiology, is that it focusses on the mechanisms underlying patterns by identifying cause-and-effect relationships, preferably through experimentation. Physiology is directly related to the functioning and function of plants. This means that physiological knowledge is imperative for understanding the habitat requirements of endangered native plants and of potentially invasive exotic plants, and the ecological impacts of invasive exotic plants and migrating native plants. An accessory advantage of working with plants is that they lend themselves extremely well for experimental studies, as they are sessile, can easily be marked, and frequently can be grown in large numbers under greenhouse or garden conditions. Plants are thus ideal objects for conservation physiological studies.
Given that plants are underrepresented, a logical question is what kind of plant studies fall under the umbrella of conservation physiology. The three reviews on plants that were published in Conservation Physiology in 2013 do a great job in setting the scene. Hans Lambers and colleagues reviewed the research on phosphorus-sensitive plants in a global biodiversity hotspot. Many of these species are threatened by the introduced pathogen Phytophthora cinnamomi and by eutrophication; the latter partly due to large-scale application of phosphite-containing fungicides (biostats) that are used to fight the pathogen. This illustrates how one conservation measure may cause undesired side effects. Physiological understanding of how phosphite functions could help to develop alternative fungicides with less negative side effects. Fiona Hay and Robin Probert reviewed recent research on seed conservation of wild plant species. They clearly make the case that if we want to preserve genetic material of wild plant species in ex-situ seed banks for conservation purposes, physiological research is imperative for developing optimal storage, germination and growth conditions. Last but not least, Jennifer Funk reviewed research on physiological characteristics of exotic plant species invading low-resource environments. Prevention of invasions and mitigation of the impacts of invasions requires physiological research that resolves the question whether exotic species manage to invade low-resource environments through enhanced resource acquisition, resource conservation or both. These three reviews thus illustrate already three important plant-related topics in conservation physiology: causes of threat of native plants, ex-situ conservation, and invasive exotic plants.
An important topic that hasn´t been covered yet in the journal Conservation Physiology is how plants will respond to climate change. As physiology underlies the fundamental niche of a species, physiological studies can inform predictive models on potential responses of plants to climate change. Related topics are how endangered and invasive plant species will respond to increased CO2 levels, and how their vulnerability to diseases may change under novel climatic conditions. Furthermore, as we seem to miserably fail in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, it becomes also more likely that governments will start to implement climate engineering methods to reduce incoming solar radiation or atmospheric CO2 levels. Undesired ecological side effects of these methods will raise novel conservation issues for which physiological knowledge will be imperative. Other topics that haven’t been covered yet are physiological responses of plants to pollution, and how endangered species that are difficult to propagate from seeds could be multiplied using tissue culture or other techniques. Obviously, the list of potential topics that I have mentioned here is far from exhaustive, but I hope it illustrates that many of the plant-related topics on which many of us work already or will work in the future fit within the discipline of conservation physiology.
Mark van Kleunen is a Professor of Ecology at the University of Konstanz. His research focusses on invasiveness of exotic plants, plant responses to global change and life-history evolution. This blog post is an adapted version of his editorial ‘Conservation Physiology of Plants‘ in the journal Conservation Physiology.
Conservation Physiology is an online only, fully open access journal published on behalf of the Society for Experimental Biology. Biodiversity across the globe faces a growing number of threats associated with human activities. Conservation Physiology publishes research on all taxa (microbes, plants and animals) focused on understanding and predicting how organisms, populations, ecosystems and natural resources respond to environmental change and stressors. Physiology is considered in the broadest possible terms to include functional and mechanistic responses at all scales.
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Image credit: California wildflowers. By Rennett Stowe. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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By: Jack Nisbet,
on 11/8/2012
When we were growing up, my brother and I devoured all kinds of science fiction. One moment we were waiting at the comic book store for the new pulp installment of the "slow glass" series; the next we spent trying to break down the radioactive process behind a B movie that allowed giant ants to [...]
By: Greg Leitich Smith,
on 8/2/2012
5 Stars Rhyming text and illustrations explore some of the many things a leaf can be, from tree topper to rain stopper. Includes facts about leafs and a glossary. A leaf is a leaf— A bit of a tree. But just try to guess What else it can be! This book, A Leaf Can Be [...]
By: Jessamyn West,
on 4/26/2007
I have a talk today at the Library Association of Rockland County meeting today in Suffern New York. I gave a variant of the 2.0 talk I have been giving lately. This one is called Web 2.0, Library 2.0, Librarian 2.0. Good news about what you are already doing. The funny thing is, while it looks similar to my other talks, every talk on this same topic winds up being totally different. Same loose outline, almost all new words.
When I gave a version of this talk in Kansas, it was much lower tech, a lot more focused on rural and local issues. When I talked to the people in New York I talked more about cell phones and the ideas that libraries have already been doing a lot of 2.0-ish stuff and not even knowing it. Also since I knew Steven Cohen was speaking in the afternoon about specific technologies, I did a lot less show and tell and a lot more big picture talking. I showed off more stuff, and especially more local stuff, when I was speaking in Kansas.
dodge, kansas, l2, larc, me, suffern, talks
Thanks for featuring Anita Silvey's new book. I'm a plant/nature enthusiast and I'm sure The Plant Hunters will be a fascinating and insightful read. Must add to my reading list!