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"Botany China."
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The paper road
This exhilarating book interweaves the stories of two early twentieth-century botanists to explore the collaborative relationships each formed with Yunnan villagers in gathering botanical specimens from the borderlands between China, Tibet, and Burma. Erik Mueggler introduces Scottish botanist George Forrest, who employed Naxi adventurers in his fieldwork from 1906 until his death in 1932. We also meet American Joseph Francis Charles Rock, who, in 1924, undertook a dangerous expedition to Gansu and Tibet with the sons and nephews of Forrest's workers. Mueggler describes how the Naxi workers and their Western employers rendered the earth into specimens, notes, maps, diaries, letters, books, photographs, and ritual manuscripts. Drawing on an ancient metaphor of the earth as a book, Mueggler provides a sustained meditation on what can be copied, translated, and revised and what can be folded back into the earth.
eBook
Chinese medicinal plants, herbal drugs and substitutes : an identification guide
The product of fifteen years of collecting activity throughout China, this book offers the first comprehensive, botanically authoritative, and practical illustrated identification guide to Chinese medicinal plants and drugs and their substitutes.
eBook
Ordering the Myriad Things
Winner of the 2024 SHNH Natural History Book Prize (The John Thackray Medal)An exploration of plant wisdom, from the Southern Mountain Tea Flower to the Dawn RedwoodChina’s vast and ancient body of documented knowledge about plants includes horticultural manuals and monographs, comprehensive encyclopedias, geographies, and specialized anthologies of verse and prose written by keen observers of nature. Until the late nineteenth century, however, standard practice did not include deploying a set of diagnostic tools using a common terminology and methodology to identify and describe new and unknown species or properties.Ordering the Myriad Things relates how traditional knowledge of plants in China gave way to scientific botany between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, when plants came to be understood in a hierarchy of taxonomic relationships to other plants and within a broader ecological context. This shift not only expanded the universe of plants beyond the familiar to encompass unknown species and geographies but fueled a new knowledge of China itself. Nicholas K. Menzies highlights the importance of botanical illustration as a tool for recording nature—contrasting how images of plants were used in the past to the conventions of scientific drawing and investigating the transition of “traditional” systems of organization, classification, observation, and description to “modern” ones.
eBook
Ordering the Myriad Things
Winner of the 2024 SHNH Natural History Book Prize (The John Thackray Medal)An exploration of plant wisdom, from the Southern Mountain Tea Flower to the Dawn RedwoodChina's vast and ancient body of documented knowledge about plants includes horticultural manuals and monographs, comprehensive encyclopedias, geographies, and specialized anthologies of verse and prose written by keen observers of nature. Until the late nineteenth century, however, standard practice did not include deploying a set of diagnostic tools using a common terminology and methodology to identify and describe new and unknown species or properties.Ordering the Myriad Things relates how traditional knowledge of plants in China gave way to scientific botany between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, when plants came to be understood in a hierarchy of taxonomic relationships to other plants and within a broader ecological context. This shift not only expanded the universe of plants beyond the familiar to encompass unknown species and geographies but fueled a new knowledge of China itself. Nicholas K. Menzies highlights the importance of botanical illustration as a tool for recording nature-contrasting how images of plants were used in the past to the conventions of scientific drawing and investigating the transition of \"traditional\" systems of organization, classification, observation, and description to \"modern\" ones.
eBook
Durum wheat with the introgressed TaMATE1B gene shows resistance to terminal drought by ensuring deep root growth in acidic and Al.sup.3+-toxic subsoils
Background and aims High aluminum (Al.sup.3+) concentrations associated with subsoil acidity is a major constraint to durum wheat (Triticum turgidum) production as it inhibits root growth affecting crop tolerance to drought. This study evaluated the introgressed TaMATE1B gene on drought resistance and Al.sup.3+ toxicity in durum wheat. Methods Durum wheat lines Jandaroi-TaMATE1B (introgressed with the TaMATE1B gene) and Jandaroi-null (without TaMATE1B gene) were grown in 1-m deep columns filled with re-constructed field soil with Al.sup.3+-rich acid subsoil in a glasshouse under well-watered conditions until the onset of ear emergence (Z.sub.51), before imposing well-watered and terminal drought treatments. Results Jandaroi-TaMATE1B produced 25.3 % higher grain yield than Jandaroi-null under well-watered conditions and 49.0 % higher grain yield under terminal drought. Terminal drought reduced grain yield by 47.7 % in Jandaroi-TaMATE1B and 72 % in Jandaroi-null, relative to well-watered conditions. The effects of TaMATE1B on grain yield can be attributed to increased root growth and proliferation below 0.4 m in Al.sup.3+-toxic soil. Jandaroi-TaMATE1B had 34.5 and 32.0 % more total root biomass than Jandaroi-null in the well-watered and terminal drought treatments, respectively (P [less than or equal to] 0.05). Jandaroi-TaMATE1B had a significantly higher root: shoot ratio than Jandaroi-null at Z.sub.51. Introgression of the TaMATE1B gene did not affect grain-filling duration, but terminal drought reduced it by 24 days in both lines. Conclusions Introgression of the Al.sup.3+-tolerant TaMATE1B gene into durum wheat improved terminal drought resistance by enabling root growth and proliferation into deep layers of Al.sup.3+-rich acidic soil.
Journal Article
Contrasting elevational diversity patterns between eukaryotic soil microbes and plants
The diversity of eukaryotic macroorganisms such as animals and plants usually declines with increasing elevation and latitude. By contrast, the community structure of prokaryotes such as soil bacteria does not generally correlate with elevation or latitude, suggesting that differences in fundamental cell biology and/or body size strongly influence diversity patterns. To distinguish the influences of these two factors, soil eukaryotic microorganism community structure was investigated in six representative vegetation sites along an elevational gradient from forest to alpine tundra on Changbai Mountain in Northeast China, and compared with our previous determination of soil bacterial community structure along the same gradient. Using bar-coded pyrosequencing, we found strong site differences in eukaryotic microbial community composition. However, diversity of the total eukaryotic microorganism community (or just the fungi or protists alone) did not correlate with elevation. Instead, the patterns of diversity and composition in the total eukaryotic microbial community (and in the protist community alone) were closely correlated with soil pH, suggesting that just as for bacteria, acidity is a particularly important determinant of eukaryotic microbial distributions. By contrast, as expected, plant diversity at the same sites declined along our elevational gradient. These results together suggest that elevational diversity patterns exhibited by eukaryotic microorganisms are fundamentally different from those of plants.
Journal Article