Dr M’s first lesson with MSc Plant Diversity students and MSc SISS included a tour round the woodland known as the Wilderness on the University of Reading award-winning green campus.
Dr M will be meeting his new University of Reading MSc Plant Diversity and MSc Species Identification and Survey Skills (SISS) students for his first big teach-in on Thursday.
Dr M is stuck in a train somewhere near Slough as he heads to the second meeting of the UK Plant Science Federation working group on training and skills to save UK botany from oblivion! Important work this and fortunately he is not alone, the working group has no fewer than sixteen keen and able people botanically beavering away on the issues and outcomes.
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Dr M has been enjoying a recent burst of virtual botanical activity on Twitter stimulated by Dr Chris Martine launching the hashtag #iamabotanist which has seen a great response from botanists and non-botanists and spouses and so on all proudly posting pictures and telling the Twitter world who and where they are and what they are up to (botanically speaking!). There has been a tiny
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At last Twitter is alive with the sound of botany! Or at least the dulcet tones of a podcast from Dr Chris Martine of Bucknell University in the USA and a host of hashtags proclaiming #iamabotanist and #reclaimthename.
The latest in Dr M’s series of botanical selfies ascends 3600 m and finds PhD student Alan Elliott giving up on computer games and going wild about Mecanopsis… I am… Alan Elliott, a final year PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh working on a project looking the dynamics of speciation in the Himalaya. I got into botany… by accident.
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The National Trust has gone crazy wild about getting the nation’s kids outside at the weekend so they’ve put together a list of 50 things to do before you’re 11¾ along with the 50 place finder to locate great places to do them, woods, fields, hills, caves, ponds and streams! They want to encourage kids to get mucky, discover their wild side and get closer to
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Dr M was today totally bowled over and utterly charmed by a truly massive Cork Oak (Quercus suber) at Standish Hospital, in Gloucestershire.
Last year Dr M was struck by an article entitled“The Death of Botany” in the “Rant and Reason” section of the June 2013 edition of the magazine of the British Ecological Society. In this rant, Dr Markus Eichhorn, botanist at the University of Nottingham, bemoaned the loss of botany degree programmes from UK Universities.
Dr M’s mission to discover the best plant ID aids continues, and recently stumbled upon (for that is how the internet often works!) a nice post by Michelle Slatella on the US Gardenista website reviewing apps for plant ID.