Invitation to the February Berry Go Round Blog Carnival
The title and theme of the carnival is: Botanical Warfare: Parasites, Stranglers, Chemists, and Thieves.
If you’re planning a botanical report or review during February, and can include something about interactions with other plants or with animals, please submit a post to the carnival using the handy submission form. Summaries of published research are appropriate. The carnival will appear at the end of February.
The January Carnival is being hosted by Tim Havenith. Here’s a sample:
Berry Go Round #66 for January blog posts
January Berry Go Round Topics: Plant and Nature Studies
Welcome to the 66th edition of Berry Go Round.
During this month, I’ve noticed how a lot of our botanical writings have been about our relationship with plants. Whether we’re out hunting for new plants, trying to identify what we see, classifying major groups of plants, deciding their fates, or just enjoying them – plants are a massive part of our lives in many different ways.
Kicking us off this month is Dr Chris Martine, who presents the excellent Plants are cool too series over on YouTube. He writes about the amazing things that we learned about plants during 2013:
A brand new cell part that flavors wine, a flower that depends on “footlong” moth tongues and a list of about 1,000 new species are the stories that topped my list of the most impressive things we learned about plants last year.
Read more over at Chris’ article on the Huffington Post: 3 Awesome Things We Learned About Plants in 2013.
Chris also wrote about what happened when his daughter argued with her teacher about the classification of the humble tomato:
You say “tomato” and I say “tomahto.” Either way, we’re still going to argue about whether it’s a fruit or a vegetable — especially when the issue gets in the craw of my tween daughter.
Chris highlights the often conflicting definitions that we use when trying to classify the often complex natural world. Read more here.
Classifying plants is an ongoing process, as anyone whose noticed age old names of plants being changed by taxonomists will have noticed! Methods of identifying plants are also an ongoing process. Peter Orchard is developing a new identification system for his website and you can be among those to help him improve his system as well as identify plants using his old system:
Back in April 2013 I introduced a new feature to my Nature of Dorset website. It was a ‘top down’ pictorial system that helped casual observers identify anything from mammals to fungi. I admit it is pretty basic and has many flaws but I do get positive feedback about how useful people found have it.
Go to Tim’s blog for more, and be sure to submit your blog for the February Berry Go Round Carnival.