🌱 TWiB August 16, 2021
It's been a mixed week this week. The climate stories are depressing. The positive for me is that I can always work on something else for a break. I wonder how it is for people who research the ongoing damage from rising temperatures. On the plus side, working with Lorena, I might be able to solve a problem that's been hanging around a couple of years. With luck, there'll be some news in September.
What I can say there will be is another newsletter next week, with another selection of the stories you're sharing on Twitter. Until then, stay safe.
Alun (webmaster@botany.one)
In Botany One
Ant protection from elephant herbivory in West African Acacias — www.botany.one Ants can provide effective protection from elephant herbivory in East African Acacia species, but is this true for species of West Africa?
The future of digital technologies for crops — www.botany.one Cyber physical technologies such as earth observation and biophysical crop modelling can play a major role in production, sustainability, and profitability of production systems in the face of climate change.
Mosquito manufacture mystery: Maths and materials — www.botany.one Why citing sources matters.
Do hybrids help a plant expand their range, or do they get in the way? — www.botany.one While hybrid plants might be less successful than their parents, if enough survive they can backcross with a parent species. This can help a parent colonise a new territory.
Modeling the circadian clock — www.botany.one A novel circadian clock model based on real-world clocks delivers simplicity, entrainment, reliability, and accuracy.
Approaches for orchid conservation at the U.S. Botanic Garden — www.botany.one The United States Botanic Garden combines science and education to keep orchids safe in their collections and in the wild.
News & Views
Indigenous Amazon Communities Fight Deforestation with New Early-Alert Tool A pilot program reveals that deforestation declined when Peruvian Indigenous communities use an early-alert-system app to detect forest loss
This Sweet White Flower Is Actually A Sneaky Carnivore, Scientists Discover — www.npr.org A pretty little white flower that grows near urban centers of the Pacific Northwest turns out to be a killer.
Global Temperature Over My Lifetime — xkcd.com
Power plants: making electricity from flowers and fruits Chemist María Fernanda Cerdá uses natural dyes from Uruguay’s indigenous flora to build solar cells.
Invasive garlic mustard hurts native species—but its harmful powers wane over time This noxious weed may be less fearful than thought, a symptom of harm rather than its main cause. It's also edible—but beware the cyanide.
A Monumental 20-Story Wildflower Blooms Above Jersey City in a New Mural by Artist Mona Caron — www.thisiscolossal.com A single Joe Pye weed with barbed leaves and a blossoming head looms over Jersey City in a staggering new mural by Mona Caron.
How indigenous peoples can help the world meet its climate goals The first time Mandy Gull visited Canada’s Broadback Forest, she was struck by the displays of delicate lichen. By the dense, ancient trees. By the moss-covered floor, which rose and fell like a rumpled green blanket
The climatologist who put climate science ‘on the offensive’ – POLITICO — www.politico.eu Friederike Otto has tailored her research to beat back doubt about the link between extreme events and climate change.
Beronda Montgomery: Lessons from Plants - Science Clear+Vivid - Omny.fm Beronda Montgomery suggests we humans have a lot to learn from the surprising ways plants connect, communicate and collaborate.
Scientific Papers
The watermelon (Citrullus lanatus subsp. vulgaris) is among the world's most important fruit crops. Wolcott et al. use C-14 dating and morphometric analysis to test whether ancient seeds can be identified to species level, which would help document food expansion, innovation, and diversity in Northeastern Africa.
Slot et al. determined gmin in relation to temperature for 24 tropical tree species across a steep rainfall gradient in Panama, by recording leaf drying curves at different temperatures in the laboratory.
Plants with less chlorophyll: A global change perspective
The necessary reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions may lead in the future to an increase in solar irradiance (solar brightening). Anthropogenic aerosols (and their precursors) that cause solar dimming are in fact often co-emitted with GHGs. While the reduction of GHG emissions is expected to slow down the ongoing increase in the greenhouse effect, an increased surface irradiance due to reduced atmospheric aerosol load might occur in the most populated areas of the earth. Genesio et al. propose that new plants (crops, orchards and forests) with low-chlorophyll (Chl) content may provide a realistic, sustainable and relatively simple solution to increase surface reflectance of large geographical areas via changes in surface albedo.
Global forest restoration opportunities to foster coral reef conservation — onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Suarez-Castro et al. develop a systematic approach for identifying global forest restoration opportunities that would also result in large decreases in the flux of sediments to coral reefs. They estimate how land-use change affects sediment runoff globally using high-resolution spatial data and determine the subsequent risk of sediment exposure on coral reefs using a diffusion-based ocean transport model. Their results reveal that sediment export is a major issue affecting 41% of coral reefs globally.
A simple explanation for declining temperature sensitivity with warming
Recently, multiple studies have reported declining phenological sensitivities (∆ days per ℃) with higher temperatures. Such observations have been used to suggest climate change is reshaping biological processes, with major implications for forecasts of future change. Wolkovich et al. show that these results may simply be the outcome of using linear models to estimate nonlinear temperature responses, specifically for events that occur after a cumulative thermal threshold is met—a common model for many biological events.
Research inequity in the plant sciences
Do all plant biologists worldwide have equal access to novel methods, enabling them to be equally productive, publish, and receive credit for their research? Or does reduced access to cutting-edge techniques in countries with lower financial resources create an inequity for researchers located there? Such disparities and biases do exist within our discipline and must be addressed if we are to move forward as a more just society. Applications in Plant Sciences has taken steps to address this important issue of research inequity.
our knowledge of how the coexistence between host plants and fungal endophytes is regulated remains limited. Leaf functional traits may act as relevant ecological hub of fungal endophyte colonization, community composition and life behaviour in natural ecosystems, with potential bottom-up effects on other organisms, including pathogens. Gonzalez-Teuber et al. highlight and discuss critical aspects in this topic and end by proposing new avenues of research in this emerging field.
A fossil record of land plant origins from charophyte algae — science.sciencemag.org
Until now, the first fossil evidence of land plants was from the Devonian era 420 million years ago. However, molecular phylogenetic evidence has suggested an earlier origin in the Cambrian. Strother and Foster describe an assemblage of fossil spores from Ordivician deposits in Australia dating to approximately 480 million years ago.
Mechanoperception, the ability to perceive and respond to mechanical stimuli, is a common and fundamental property of all forms of life. Vascular plants such as Mimosa pudica use this function to protect themselves against herbivory. The mechanical stimulus caused by a landing insect triggers a rapid closing of the leaflets that drives the potential pest away. While this thigmonastic movement is caused by ion fluxes accompanied by a rapid change of volume in the pulvini, the mechanism responsible for the detection of the mechanical stimulus remains poorly understood. Tran et al. examined the role of mechanosensitive ion channels in the first step of this evolutionarily-conserved defense mechanism: the mechanically evoked closing of the leaflet.
Evolutionary innovations driving abiotic stress tolerance in C4 grasses and cereals
Pardo and VanBuren discuss the evolutionary innovations that make C4 grasses so resilient, with a particular emphasis on grasses from the Chloridoideae (chloridoid) and Panicoideae (panicoid) subfamilies. They propose that a baseline level of resilience in chloridoid ancestors allowed them to colonize harsh habitats, and these environments drove selective pressure that enabled the repeated evolution of abiotic stress tolerance traits.
Careers
Scientist, Computational Biologist Pairwise is looking to hire a computational biologist who is interested in leveraging data driven methods for gene discovery and allele design. This role will play a key part in helping to distill meaning and insight from large genomic, structural, genetic and phenotypic data sets.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow/Research Fellow in Sorghum Genetics and Genomics for Plant Network Biology This position will join a dynamic research team focused on sorghum breeding and genomics based at Warwick in Queensland and led by Prof David Jordan and Dr Emma Mace. The position will have access to large data sets generated through previous research in sorghum and generated in the course of the centre of excellence.
Cropping Systems Agronomist The role of the Cropping Systems Agronomist is to undertake research with the aim to provide solutions to raise productivity and resource use efficiencies. The appointment will complement and extend existing CSIRO skills in soil-plant systems research and drive new collaborative opportunities within CSIRO with both external collaborators and investors, and international partners.
Postdoctoral Research Associate The Terrestrial Ecosystem Science (TES) science focus area at ORNL is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Associate with a passion for studying the natural world, motivated to take on the challenge of improving our understanding of linkages between root dynamics and ecosystem processes under changing environmental conditions.
Assistant Professor The Department of Biological Sciences (https://www.biol.vt.edu/) at Virginia Tech is seeking to hire a tenure track assistant professor in the area of Cell and Molecular Biology. We welcome applicants whose research addresses fundamental cell and/or molecular biology questions, regardless of experimental model and/or type of experimental approaches (including computational) used.
Tenure-track Faculty in Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology The University of Chicago’s Department of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology (http://mgcb.bsd.uchicago.edu/) in the Biological Sciences Division seeks faculty candidates working in molecular genetics, molecular biology, cell biology, developmental biology, quantitative biology, and related fields. We welcome applicants whose research addresses biological questions at molecular, cellular, and/or organismal scales. Those working in plant systems are especially encouraged to apply.
Senior Analytical Chemist/Platform Manager in mass spectroscopy and chromatography – LC-MS and GC-MS The Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science, at the University of Copenhagen is recruiting a Senior Analytical Chemist to head the LC-MS and GC-MS metabolomics platform embedded in the section for Plant Biochemistry. The position is full-time and is offered for three years (with possibility for extension) starting 01 October 2021 or as soon as possible thereafter.
Research Fellow in Forest Ecology – CareersinHE.com The position is part of the UKRI-funded project MEMBRA, which aims to understand and quantify how trees acquire, retain, and transmit ‘memory’ of stress. The research fellow will coordinate the data collection and carry out exciting and crucial analyses on the response of trees to different stresses integrating information from forest dynamics, ecology, dendrochronology and molecular biology.
Postdoctoral Associate An immediate opening for a self-motivated and independent post-doctoral associate is available in the Microbiological Sciences Department of North Dakota State University, in the laboratory of Dr. Barney Geddes. The primary project will involve studying the microbiome of dry edible pea under disease, saline and drought stress. This will include a combination of field work and laboratory assays.
Postdoc position in Ecological genetics
We are looking for a highly motivated individual to join our ongoing research projects on the study of the optimization of diffuse mutualisms in plant-pollinator interactions. The project's main focus is to use a combination of ecological genetic, computer vision, and molecular approaches to estimate how evolution shapes efficient generalist pollination systems. The position is associated with the research group of Adrien Sicard at the Swedish Agricultural University in Uppsala and part of Human Frontier Science Program-funded project involving the Christina Grozinger's Pollinator Behavioral Ecology Lab (The Pennsylvania State University) and the Benjamin Risse's Computer Vision and Machine Learning System Group (Müster University, Germany).
Chief Botanist The Chief Botanist is a key leadership position at NatureServe and provides strategic direction on the development of scientific methods, data, analyses, and information products designed to promote the lasting conservation of North American plants. The Chief Botanist guides efforts to develop, document, and maintain the most current and robust data on the taxonomy, conservation status, distribution, and conservation requirements of plant species and is responsible for assuring the accuracy, completeness, currency and scientific validity of NatureServe's botanical information.
Ecologist This position is located This position is located at the Pacific Northwest Research Station located in Wenatchee, WA. Works with scientists in the lab in the areas of pre-fire and post-fire restoration treatments, assessing the impacts of dry forest management on wildlife habitat, and assessing/predicting regional forest change in the context of disturbances
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