Guest blog post by Marcos Caraballo The birdcatcher trees – genus Pisonia – are infamous for trapping birds with their super-sticky seed pods that would frequently entangle the body of the ‘victim’. Left flightless, the poor feathered creatures eventually die either from starvation or fatigue, or predators. Similarly notorious are the birdcatcher trees for botanists, […]
So, it’s been ten years and exactly 150 issues since what currently is known as one of the top scholarly journals in plant systematics was launched with the aim to address four key challenges in research accessibility, all of which, however, remain all too relevant still: Digitisation of academic research; Open Access as a publishing […]
A major advance in revealing the unknown plant diversity on planet Earth is made with a new monograph, published in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PhytoKeys. The global-wide study, conducted by researchers at the University of Oxford, lists details about each of the 425 New World species in the largest genus within the family of morning […]
A recent examination revealed that Chusquea oxyphylla, a fossilised leafy branch from the early Eocene in Patagonia, which has been widely cited as the oldest bamboo fossil and as evidence for a Gondwanan origin of bamboos is actually a conifer. The results of the finding are published in the open-access journal Phytokeys.
Following the submission of their data paper manuscript, which serves to describe the herbarium dataset of vascular plants at the University of Cordoba (Spain), to the open access journal PhytoKeys, Dr Gloria Martínez-Sagarra and Prof Juan Antonio Devesa received a data audit report, prepared by data specialist Dr Robert Mesibov. As part of the routine […]
A new issue of the scholarly, open-access and peer-reviewed journal PhytoKeys focuses on the Chinese biodiversity hotspots and their substantial role in understanding the country’s unique flora. The special issue embarks on a treasure hunt into China’s biodiversity hotspots, including the descriptions of 23 species previously unknown to science and new insights into the ecological […]
A collaborative team of scientists from the US and Australia has named a new plant species from the remote Outback. Bucknell University biology postdoctoral fellow Angela McDonnell and professor Chris Martine led the description of the plant that had confounded field biologists for decades because of the unusual fluidity of its flower form. The discovery, published in […]
Picos de Europa National Park has given its name to a new species of perennial bromegrass, discovered in Spain. Bromus picoeuropeanus belongs to a rather underrepresented on the Iberian Peninsula perennial group within the grass genus Bromus, with the new species being just the fourth of all recognised wild species living in the Iberian territory. […]
Aloe sanguinalis, or Somali Red Aloe, forms large, conspicuous clumps and has blood red sap. Its can easily be spotted from the road, but the species has only just been named and described in the open access journal PhytoKeys. It remains a mystery how this beautiful and showy aloe species has remained undescribed by science […]
The small genus is found exclusively in the recently recognized Seasonally Dry Tropical Forests biome. A new species of the Brazil-endemic small genus Mcvaughia is described as part of a extended revision of this unique group. The study was published in the open access journal PhytoKeys. Mcvaughia is a genus of the plant family Malpighiaceae comprising just three known species, all […]