The tropics hold most of the planet’s biodiversity. In order to preserve this fragile and valuable asset, many individuals and communities need to get involved and be well informed. However, tropical ecology and conservation sciences are still often affected by colonialistic and discriminatory practices, which can hamper nature conservation success. An international research team from leading universities in tropical research has now proposed how researchers from the Global South, which consists of nations historically damaged by colonialism, could better promote solutions for a sustainable development.
Researchers surveyed more than 2,800 people to assess how accepting they might be of gene-edited table grapes, even though none are yet on the market. Most participants cared more about the grapes’ taste, followed by their appearance, than how the grapes were bred.
We are in the middle of a pandemic, but the experience is different for everyone. This was expressed beautifully in an original tweet by Damian Barr, later expanded by another author into a poem. “We are not all in the same boat. We are all in the same storm. Some are on super-yachts. Some have just the one oar.”
Plant geneticists seeking to understand the history of the plants we eat can decode the genomes of ancient crops from rare, well-preserved samples. However, this approach leaves significant gaps in the timelines of where and when many modern-day fruits, vegetables, and cereal crops evolved, and paints an incomplete picture of what they looked like. A Science & Society article details a unique approach to filling these gaps using art–and calls on museum goers and art aficionados to help find paintings that could have useful depictions.
Last week’s board meeting was incredible. That’s not something you normally hear after a meeting! What really struck me was just how global the Global Plant Council now is. The Board consists of representatives from 10 different countries on 5 continents (Chile, Mexico, Canada, UK, Spain, India, Italy, China, Japan and Australia). Every one of us at that meeting was in some kind of lockdown. I was overwhelmed with just how connected we all are. It was quite emotional.
Humanity’s impact on nature
All of humanity is in this pandemic together. But we are also all connected through nature: the atmosphere with rising CO2 changing our climate; the heartbreaking destruction of habitats around the world; and our need to grow and distribute enough food to feed everyone. These things are not independent from one another. There is increasing evidence that zoonotic diseases, like COVID-19, HIV-AIDS and SARS-1, are more likely to arise where habitat destruction leads to the increasing juxtaposition of people and wild animals.
This pandemic should be a wake-up call. Sustainability is not only important, it is essential. Ecosystems need to be conserved, not just because they have a right to be preserved for their own sakes, but for the health and well-being of the human population. It is arrogant of humans to think we can do whatever we like with nature. Right now, nature is coming back to bite us.
Plants around the world are being driven to extinction by excessive use of resources, land clearing and climate change. We don’t even know how many plants there are in the world. At the most basic level, we may be losing plants with unique chemicals that could be used to cure diseases, unique genotypes of crop wild relatives that could be a source of traits to improve agricultural productivity and so on.
Agriculture is responsible for 26% of global greenhouse gases emissions, 70% of the freshwater use and occupies 50% of the habitable land surface. Plant scientists around the world are working to document species diversity, design conservation reserves, collect seeds for storage in seed banks, develop more efficient crops that use less fertiliser and water and are resistant to pests and diseases without the need for the application of large volumes of agrichemicals.
The Global Plant Council aims to increase the awareness plants, of the need to train plant scientists and to supply them with research funding. It seems crazy that we have to say this, but with a world inflicted with plant blindness, our first job is to get people to just open their eyes and see the plants around them and the central role they play. Just having an organisation called The Global Plant Council enables journalists and influencers to identify people to contact for comment in different countries. This is one reason why we are so keen to have representatives from all countries and from many different plant science organisations around the world.
Different media reach different audiences.
In the past two years we have grown our social media presence by 50% percent annually, largely due to the efforts of our Chief Communications Officer, Dr Isabel Mendoza (currently locked down in Valencia, Spain). We are also expanding into different languages with a Spanish Twitter account and a new Weibo account to reach our Chinese followers. English maybe the current international language of science but if we want to reach people across the world, we need to communicate in different languages and on different platforms.
At this years’ GPC annual meeting we were planning to run a workshop on science communication with a special workshop run by the award-winning Italian science journalist Michele Catanzaro. We always hold our meetings in conjunction with a larger plant science conference, rotating around the world – last year it was at the ICAR meeting in Wuhan, and this year we planned to meet in Torino, Italy at Plant Biology Europe 2020. The conference has, of course, been postponed due to the raging pandemic. We really hope we can hold this fantastic workshop one way next year.
The annual business meeting this year will still need to be held and we will do that virtually. This is not easy given all the different time zones, but instead of an imposition, we should instead celebrate that the GPC is now truly global. The Era we live in, the Holocene, is characterised by possibly the highest biodiversity in the history of our planet. As we move into the Anthropocene, that is changing. Let’s work together to minimize the damage. It’s not going to be easy, but without plants, it’s impossible.
Author: Prof. Ros Gleadow, President of The Global Plant Council
Re-published with permission from John Innes Centre. Thank you to James Piercy for sharing.
‘Science is not finished until it is communicated’, so said Sir Mark Walport, former medical scientist and the Chief Executive of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Unsurprisingly, being in the Communications and Engagement team, we agree with Sir Walport, and there are a number of ways that science can and is communicated. We can do:
press releases,
use social media
organise outreach events
we have meetings
write reports and labour over publishing peer-reviewed papers.
Another vital method for peer-to-peer communication is at scientific conferences. Hordes of scientists from a particular field, come together to showcase their latest research and to learn about the work of their peers, collaborators or competitors.
Alongside the oral presentations, or talks, a key way to communicate the latest research and results is through ‘poster sessions’. Here scientists, of all levels in their careers, present their latest discovery on a sheet paper or fabric, pinned to a board.
Poster sessions provide an ideal
opportunity for peer-to-peer learning and should be an excellent
experience for presenter and viewer.
As a presenter, this is a
captive audience. There are large numbers of people who are interested
in your field of research and they are all there to learn. They want to
get their fill of new methods, exciting initial results and network with
like-minded people from all over the world.
But in reality, poster sessions aren’t as useful or enjoyable as they should be. Why is that?
There is a burgeoning grass roots initiative led by Psychology PhD student Mike Morrison, that believes that one of the reasons for this is that the posters on display at these sessions aren’t designed in the optimal way for the environment and context they’re used in. In other words, the audience posters are created for aren’t given the information contained within them, in a way that allows them to access it.
User-centred design is the process of considering how an object will, or needs to be, used and designing it accordingly. For example, think of a door which can only open in one direction. From one side the door needs to be pulled and from the other pushed. Effective user design of that door, would mean that on the pull side of the door there is a handle, allowing the user to pull open the door and on the other side, no handle but a flat plate.
A pull handle works perfectly on the
side of the door which needs to be pulled but hinders the user on the
push side. The handle implies that the user should pull the door,
potentially walking into it, before realising it doesn’t open in that
direction and then pushing the door.
Why? Because a handle suggests to the user that door needs to be pulled and thus influences the user’s behaviour. Wasted time and potential (minor) injury, all because of poor user design.
The same principles of considering how something will be used and then designing accordingly can be used for anything from doors to websites. It is here that Mike’s push to apply these principles to scientific posters comes in and his video (above) is well worth investing 20 minutes of your time.
When Mike, was first asked to make a scientific poster he thought the reason most academic posters look the way they do is because they have to. However, he soon learned that there were no rules for academic poster design enshrined into academic lore and realised there was a huge opportunity to improve the way research is communicated.
So, what can we do?
The
first thing is to change the way posters are designed and put together,
making them quicker and easier to create, which is great for the
presenter.
We can also make them better at conveying the key
information, by considering what the purpose of the poster is; i.e. what
is it trying to tell people?
An ideal academic poster should accomplish three goals;
Maximise the amount of insight transferred to attendees of the poster session
Keep the good stuff; viewers still need detail and they need to encourage conversation
We need to achieve 1 and 2, in a way that is as easy and quick as making a poster within the current conventions, otherwise it won’t happen.
To do this, consider a completely blank page and think; “if I could only put one thing on here, what would it be?” The answer is probably, the main finding of the study, because what you found is the most interesting and most relevant thing you want to tell people.
So,
you need a finding, or take-home message, to be placed prominently in
the front-and-centre, where it is easy to read and cannot be missed. The
next step is to take that finding, and without changing the meaning,
word it in such a way that it is both easy to understand and memorable.
For example, Mike found the following finding hidden away in the ‘Discussion’ section of one poster, which he then changed into Plain English;
“We found consistent differential validity for some
non-cognitive measures for predicting international student GPA,
specifically with SJT, Continuous Learning, Social Responsibility and
Perseverance”
To;
“For international students,
perseverance and a sense of social responsibility are extra important
for predicting first-year GPA”
Instantly making the key piece of information easier to digest and remember.
A good way to do this is to think of billboards which are designed to transmit information to people passing by them. As such, they provide a good starting point for scientific posters, which are essentially trying to do the same thing. Only our posters are ‘selling’ the research findings/methods/techniques, rather than a product.
However,
while that is the key take home message, a good academic poster needs to
do more than just announce the headline, because behind every headline
is the story.
For that, Mike suggests a bar on the side of the poster on which you will normally stand, called an ‘ammo box’, which features all the data (tables, graphs etc) that back up the headline and which you would refer to, in order to answer any questions that arise from people who talk to you about your poster.
On the other side of the page, Mike suggests another bar, named ‘the silent presenter’ in which you add the sections that appear on almost all scientific posters, but slimmed down and formatted in a way to be easily consumed; i.e. in bullet points. It is in this bar that you would add; the question you started with, your collaborators, an introduction, the methods, results and discussions. This space can be used to provide people an overview of the study, assuming they will be reading it silently, in three or four minutes, rather than 10.
The side bars are a key part of the
proposed new template, because they allow you to include all the
information which appeared on the old design but arranged in a way that
is optimised according to how they are used.
With the design simplified, there is room to provide a source for the full study for people who are intrigued by your headline and would like to know more, but don’t have time to talk or read your ‘silent presenter’ bar.
In
a digital age, 99% of conference attendees will have a smart phone,
which can read QR codes. A QR code is easy to create and can be added to
a poster so that anyone can photograph it and find the full study, or
further information online, quickly, easily and without needing to
interact with you at all. Using QR codes allows you to include even more
information than a traditional poster allowed for, but in a format that
saves time, cognitive effort and in much less space.
All of this
taken together allows each person who sees your poster to take exactly
the level of information away from it they want, from just the headline
finding, through to digesting the full research paper.
Finally, another good tip we were given on our facebook account by Katia Hougaard is to include a stack of business cards with your poster, so that people could take your contact information with them and contact you later.
By following Mike’s advice, together we can design better scientific posters and improve the rate of scientific progress.
This is not to say that you have to use the layout Mike suggests, but we recommend trying to create a poster that teaches attendees something as they walk by, instead of relying on them to stop and talk to you, in order to learn about your work.
In a simple and hard-hitting way, the film depicts how the staple food crop cassava is destroyed in Sub-Saharan African countries by viruses carried by whiteflies. It draws attention to the way the 1,100-strong CONNECTED Virus Network is bringing together world-class researchers from across the globe to address these issues.
Early in 2019 Eve Bannister and Charlotte May were successful in a process which saw students pitch to the CONNECTED Network to create a film which, with the co-operation of their tutors, would form a key component of their second year of studies.
Their brief was to create a 90-second outreach animation about plant diseases’ impact, primarily aimed at non-expert laypeople, and to draw attention to the importance of the CONNECTED Network in helping address these issues. It takes the example of the cassava crop to show the impact of two damaging diseases spread by insects.
The film uses imaginative stop-motion animation techniques, injecting colour and artistic interpretation to hold the viewer’s attention and to explain the food security challenges in extremely simple terms. Rather than offering technical explanations of disease symptoms, it outlines the broad issues at stake and what CONNECTED is seeking to achieve.
It’s a simple cartoon about a very serious subject.
Very few members of the public, or indeed governments, fully realise just how seriously plant diseases affect the lives of people in Sub-Saharan African countries. The devastation they cause can actually be more harmful and damaging than more commonly-known human diseases. We hope this short film contributes towards a better understanding.
We are extremely grateful to the students, and to the UWE Animation tutor team, for this exciting collaboration. We hope it plays a part in helping Eve and Charlotte develop successful future careers that we believe their talents merit.
CONNECTED Network Director, Prof. Gary Foster (University of Bristol)
Eve Bannister and Charlotte May worked from a series of images and other information supplied by a number of researchers working in the field in African countries.
This week’s post was written by Dr Ian Street (@IHStreet), the Resources Editor at AoB Blog. He is also a science writer and plant scientist. His science blog is The Quiet Branches.
On 18th May 2017, plant scientists from all over the world celebrated “International Fascination of Plants Day”. This year, plant enthusiasts could follow events around the world – thanks to social media and live-streaming. Scientists shared live broadcasts about the science they do, the facilities where they work, models from history, about engaging students with plants, and more. Botany Live, organized by the AoB Blog, was an experiment in science engagement supported by the Society for Experimental Biology, The Annals of Botany Company, and Plantae. Overall, thousands tuned in to 31 planned events registered with Botany Live.
Using Periscope and Facebook Live, some reported from dedicated events planned around Plant Day. Others talked directly to the camera and their virtual audience about plants, plant science, and communicating plant science.
The Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center (ABRC) at Ohio State University showed off the facilities and robots they use to maintain both gene stocks and seed stocks. These facilities and resources, which provide essential support for plant research, are often only known within the plant science community. Even there, how they operate on a day-to-day basis remains a mystery to many. Botany Live allowed us to take a peek at the support structures that make international plant science possible. The ABRC videos also showed how plant science is using cutting edge technology with robots to automate seed sorting and gene stocks.
Frame from the Hounsfield Facility Botany Live Broadcast, showing the glass house and the robot that carries individual plants to be scanned.
A tour of the Hounsfield X-ray Facility (@UoNHounsfield) demonstrated the high-tech nature of modern plant science too. The staging the Hounsfield video was clever, as the scientists there clearly set up marks they had to hit to be on camera at certain times demonstrating the three sizes of scanner at the facility. Their live-stream ended with Malcolm Bennett in the glass house talking about the importance of exploring root traits, a big part of what they track at Hounsfield with robots and 3D X-ray tomography.
The National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) wheat transformation facility broadcast brought us cutting-edge biology directly from the field. Alison Bentley (@AlisonRBentley) guiding us around the facility, where scientists develop and field test new varieties of wheat, followed by a look around their glasshouses. Geraint Parry (@GARNetweets) then interviewed several NIAB conference attendees. A specialized facility for wheat transformation (making transgenic wheat) is, like the ABRC and Hounsfield, a resource of a special capacity to do something technical that not all individual labs can develop.
An infected plant in background and flower in the foreground from Monica Lewandowski’s Botany Live Broadcast.
Another outdoor tour of a garden in California was given by Monica Lewandowski. She highlighted the diversity of plants grown in the state’s central valley. She also spoke about some of the challenges that plants face, and why we need plant scientists to study them. It showed the simplicity possible with Periscope broadcasts, as her session focused on just her with planned talking points, a walking path, and her voice-over.
Alun Salt of the AoB Blog brought us some short broadcasts from Kew Gardens. He gave a brief tour of the Wollemi pine, an ancient lineage known only from fossils until 1994. He also gave a quick overview of the garden’s carnivorous plants, including the coolest plant in the world, Darlingtonia californica.
Darlingtonia californica at Kew Gardens from Alun Salt’s Botany Live Broadcast.
The most popular Plant Day broadcast was from the Manchester Museum, featuring botany curators Rachel Webster (Manchester) and Donna Young (Liverpool) talking about Brendel’s Plant Models collections from Manchester and the Liverpool World Museum. They’re remarkable models of plants, made of paper mache amongst other materials, created in 1880-1920 by a father/son team in Germany. They were designed to teach plant anatomy and many are incredibly intricate, with some even being able to be taken apart to show specific parts of a flower.
Brendel Plant Model Nr. 10, Pisum Sativum: Accreditation: By David Ludwig (own work at Botanical Museum in Greifswald) Image credit: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Botany Live broadcasts came from all over the world, and the event can grow in the years to come. The format of live streaming is flexible, with elaborate or simple setups possible. Most broadcasts were under ten minutes, but some lasted almost an hour, and of course, they can be done nearly anytime and anywhere with a good data connection.
This first year of Botany Live was an experiment. With thousands of people reached (and likely more, as many of the videos are still available), it was a success and a boost to the Plant Day events already taking place, extending their reach online. Given the success the Manchester Museum had with their broadcast, more institutions being directly involved will help promote the live broadcasts and engage even more people in the fascinating world of plants.
Celebrate Fascination of Plants Day (May 18th 2017) with an exciting new science communication project!
Botany Live is asking scientists, educators, science communicators and plant fans from around the world to live-stream their fascination with plants, sharing experiments, botanic garden explorations, tours of a lab or herbarium, Fascination of Plants Day events, interviews, discussions and more!
The aim is to spark an interest in new audiences, reaching people who might not otherwise engage with Fascination of Plants Day.
Get involved by emailing webmaster@aobblog.com for a link to a Google form where you can register your livestream session! The event will take place from the 18th-21st May.
Have you ever wanted a free, on-line textbook written by experts and regularly updated?
Plants in Action is an on-line resource for students and academics teaching plant function to undergrads, published by the Australian and New Zealand societies of plant science. Each chapter has up to 100 illustrations suitable for Powerpoint presentations. It is also ideal for graduate students and post-docs in molecular biology looking for the whole-plant context for their work. Of the original 20 chapters, ten have been fully revised.
Could you begin by describing the Plants in Action (PiA) textbook and how the idea first came about?
The original editors and contributors produced a textbook on plant function that used examples from the southern hemisphere, with view of adaptations in nature to performance in cultivation. They were motived to communicate the strong plant science in Australia and New Zealand. PiA was born as a textbook in 1999, and ten years later went open-access and free online.
Who are your target audience?
Undergraduate students, educators, practitioners and researchers, and others interested in plants and how they function. PiA gets thousands of hits per day from around the globe, including developing countries.
What topics do you cover?
To the best of my knowledge, PiA is the only comprehensive plant science textbook with a southern hemisphere perspective. It covers molecular, cellular, and whole-plant function, in ecophysiology and vegetation-environment interactions, from Antarctica to the tropics. PiA features plants that are some of the best studied genetic models and crops, as well as wild plants.
The topics covered in Chapter 4: Nutrient uptake by plants involving beneficial microorganisms. Image credit: Scott Buckley, The University of Queensland.
Who has contributed to the textbook, and how did you enlist potential collaborators?
PiA was written by Australian and New Zealand plant scientists from a range of institutions, many of whom have worked on both editions. Chief Editor Dr Rana Munns and the chapter editors find new contributors if the original authors are not available, although occasionally authors volunteer contributions
What changes have you made in the second edition, and how are the revisions coming along?
PiA2 is being updated to reflect recent advances in plant science, and has a new look as software enables ever more attractive layouts, with no limit for images and illustrations. PiA can be read online and is easily printed, which is important for internet-challenged regions and for students wanting to add notes. Ten chapters are fully updated with several chapters expanded.
Revisions can be made instantly (as a wiki) but take a little longer if the expert skills of our IT assistants are required. Complete revisions of chapters are slower to come on board.
Encouragingly, some excellent contributions have recently been made by junior scientists who see a strong value in developing an open-access resource to share their expertise widely.
You mentioned the text can be translated into different languages. How might users go about getting a textbook in their native language?
The project is sponsored by the Australian and New Zealand societies of plants scientists, ACIAR, and the University of Queensland. Could you elaborate on how this funding was acquired, if possible?
Are you looking to expand on the work in the future? How can potential contributors get involved?
It would be marvelous to have a person with time and expertise to develop further materials to add to PiA2 in collaboration with editors, authors, educational designers, and students. This could include material specifically designed for schools and interactive learning tools for students of all levels. We welcome all contributors (irrespective of their connections to the plant societies), and they can contact Rana or any chapter editor.
Without plants, Earth would not give us habitat, food and materials. But with 25% of the global flora threatened with extinction, we need more people to understand plants, and what we need to do protect them and their habitats.
The first edition of Plants in Action was published by the Australian and New Zealand societies of plant science as a hardcover book in 1999, which is also now free on-line (http://plantsinaction.science.uq.edu.au/edition1/).
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