National herbaria with significant historical plant collections are critical to tracking floristic changes and patterns, which include the introduction and spread of non-native plant species. To explore the importance of herbarium specimen data in understanding floristic changes in Zimbabwe, the plant collections housed by the National Herbarium (SRGH) in Harare, Zimbabwe were utilized with his...

Plant biomass is a potential resource of chemicals, new materials and biofuels that could reduce our dependency on fossil carbon, thus decreasing the greenhouse effect. However, due to its chemical and structural complexity, plant biomass is recalcitrant to green biological transformation by enzymes, preventing the establishment of integrated bio-refineries. In order to gain more knowledge in t...

We examine the relative importance of processes that underlie plant population abundance and distribution. Two opposing views dominate the field. One posits that the ability to establish at a site is determined by the availability of suitable microsites (establishment limitation), while the second asserts that recruitment is limited by the availability of seeds (seed limitation). An underlying ...

Question: How does habitat degradation affect recruitment limitation and its components (seed limitation versus establishment limitation) of woody plant communities in a Mediterranean landscape? Location: 1600-1900m a.s.l. in the Sierra Nevada National Park, southern Spain. The landscape is a mosaic composed of native forest and two degraded landscape units: reforestation stands and shrubland. ...

ackground: DNA barcoding is a novel method of species identification based on nucleotide diversity of conserved sequences. The establishment and refining of plant DNA barcoding systems is more challenging due to high genetic diversity among different species. Therefore, targeting the conserved nuclear transcribed regions would be more reliable for plant scientists to reveal genetic diversity, s...

The Compliance and Interoperability Working Group of the Genomic Standards Consortium facilitates the establishment of a community of experts and the development of recommendations to describe genomic data and associated information. Here we present our ongoing conation to harmonise the reporting of contextual plant specimen data associated with genomics and functional genomics. This commentary...

During the past decades, agro-biodiversity has markedly declined and some species are close to extinction in large parts of Europe. Reintroduction of rare arable plant species in suitable habitats could counteract this negative trend. The study investigates optimal sowing rates of three endangered species (Legousia speculum-veneris (L.) Chaix, Consolida regalis Gray, and Lithospermum arvense L....

Successful establishment of plants is limited by both biotic and abiotic conditions and their interactions. Seedling establishment is also used as a direct measure of habitat suitability, but transient changes in vegetation might provide windows of opportunity allowing plant species to colonize sites which otherwise appear unsuitable. We aimed to study spatio-temporal variability in the effects...