Plants – chemical factories
by The blog at woodlands.co.uk, 28 February, 2021, 2 comments
It is a sad fact of life that the plant sciences do not receive much attention, indeed university botany departments and herbaria have been ‘lost or subsumed’ into faculties of biological sciences. Like some species included on The Red List of threatened species, the botany degree is seemingly on the road to extinction. Study of herbarium specimens can provide valuable information about climate change. For example, a study comparing the distribution of olive stomates of present day plants and preserved herbarium specimens has shown that the number of stomates per unit area of leaf has declined as carbon dioxide levels have increased. Herbaria can also yield information about the changing distributions / ranges of plant species, and the phenology of flowering and similar events.
Despite the declining profile of botany within universities, the fact is that without plants, we would not be here. Plants not only provide us with oxygen [as a ‘by-product’ of photosynthesis] but also Read more...
