To aficionados, fungi are freaky, mystical and overlooked. They're helping scientists learn more Fungi have long fascinated scientists and aficionados alike. These strange and often misunderstood life-forms are sought-after for food, medicine, building materials, psychedelic journeys and much mor...

Great to see fungal conservation and a wonderful organization like the California Lichen Society getting the much deserved attention.

Was a pleasure to contribute a small part to this massive WGS effort of Kew's fungarium! @estergaya.bsky.social @rbgkew.bsky.social

Check out the paper @newphyt.bsky.social 👉 doi.org/10.1111/nph.70472

From a blog called "CreationsDawn", a photo of the author smelling a ponderosa pine. The author wears a green cap, light blue-green shirt and red camel pack. They are sniffing a tree with pine bark, with a sort of red-orange color. More trees in the background.

Ponderosa pine smells like butterscotch.

Go ahead, sniff one the next time you're in the western US. Some say "vanilla", some say "oh no, my nose is covered in sap."

Let's talk about birds, butterscotch, forest fires, blue wood, & boring beetles.

But mostly this thread is about terpenes.

I fired up the old newsletter machine for the first time in a while. In it, I take a lay of the land of the Western public lands extraction boom. TLDR: it's chaos.

Read more: sageandsand.substack.com/p/sage-and-s...

Instead of a thallus, the lichen-forming fungus Botryolepraria produces a three-dimensional aerial mycelium from which its unicellular green algal symbionts (Pseudostichococcus) hang like fruit from a trellis.

Construction of the lichenized aerial mycelium in #Botryolepraria (Verrucariales; Eurotiomycetes; Ascomycota): A somatic structure unique among #fungi

New #AJB research by William Sanders, Maurizio Hernández, Sergio Pérez-Ortega, Asunción de los Ríos

doi.org/10.1002/ajb2... #plantscience #lichen

Commentary: A climate-saving lithium mine could doom an endangered desert flower The dilemma at Nevada's Rhyolite Ridge offers a preview of the hard choices ahead.

In a time where a new crisis seems to drop every min due to the current political regime, two crises remain at center of all life on earth: biodiversity & climate. Our inability to plan, prioritize & rein in consumption leads us to a false choice between the existence of a whole species and a mine.

caked up mother earth in her thigh high fishnets is stomping in her stripper heels looking back at it. The words say "Milfs for Mother Earth

The earth is once again looking back at it in her fishnets but looks more coy in this one. The words say "Ok so climate change, a couple important things to note: 1) it's not too late to make a difference 2) Every 1/10th of a degree of warming matters 3) Governments need to do most of it 4) Acting as communities really matters. Here are some things we CAN do 1) Ditch cars, take transit 2) Switch to renewable energy 3) get solar for your roof 4)Share stuff, buy less 5) Don't use AI 6) talk to your friends and family about solutions. Details here (which points to a QR)

Mother earth looks at you over her sunglasses over the words "Do something" repeated a bunch of times, then under her it says "Doing anything is better than nothing", "learn how" and a qr

Mother earth is wearing a flower crown and peeking up from the bottom of the page. The words say "Biodiversity When it comes to protecting plants and animals, start by thinking local. Animals usually suffer most from habitat loss and climate change. Solving climate change is hard. Building habitat for wildlife is easier. Every action you take matters. Here's what we can do 1) Create good habitat by planting native plants 2) Stop using pesticides and get others to stop too 3) Kill your lawn, replace with useful plants 4) Fight to preserve wild spaces and to reclaim abandoned land 5) Encourage friends and family to do all this too"

I went into goblin mode last night and completed what is for sure the most unhinged zine I have produced to date.

I'll fold some up tonight and put them around and see how people react lol

If anyone is interested in printing one for your own enjoyment, here ya go drive.google.com/file/d/1eVEW...

When we tell people that #biocrust can be a dominant form of ground cover in drylands, it can be hard to picture. Here's a perfect example from Canyonlands National Park in Utah showing how extensive biocrust cover can be!

the top half shows two panels with microscopy images. Left is a light-microscopy image of a group of algal cells. The cells are round with different sizes. Two arrows point at sporangia: one looks as if someone stuffed 8 footballs in a thin elastic bag. The other is perfectly round and contains many small spores within. The right panel shows the same group of cells, but in fluorescent microscopy, where green color shows chloroplasts. In each cell the chloroplasts are globular with small lobes sticking out. The bottom half shows a photo of Xanthoria lichen - bright yellow and leafy growing on a tree branch

⚡ Attn anyone interested in algal genomics and lichen symbiosis! ⚡ New preprint: a near chromosome-level assembly of Trebouxia sp. A48 (member of T. decolorans species complex), the photobiont of Xanthoria parietina. 1/5 #lichen #alga #genomics
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Senate Republicans want to sell 3 million acres of public land - High Country News The majority of public land is too fire prone and far away from communities to even make sense for housing, research shows.

worth calling your reps over, imo. they’re stealing your land.

www.hcn.org/articles/sen...

Reminder - Don't forget about our grants! We offer #grants for undergrads & graduate students doing research, going to symposia or workshops, and more, and the deadline for submission is coming up soon - Feb 15! Details can be found here: www.torreybotanical.org/grants-awards/

#botany 🧪🌎🌿🍄🌾

ABLS Field Research Awards are now open! Check out the details at www.abls.org

Might be time to boost this again with new people arriving from fb. Thanks @paulrfoth.bsky.social for putting this together!

go.bsky.app/Kt6UtG6

Making starter packs seems to be the hot thing and I noticed that we don't have one for conservation scientists (🧪), so here we go go.bsky.app/3CZDnb2
So if you are an active researcher and would like to be added, reply here. Please no journalists or NGOs, there are other starting lists for that ;)

Because of popular demand we have now a number II Conservation Science starter pack since the first one is full since a while 🙃. If you are not yet on the first one, pass me message. I preferentially add folks with clear conservation research focus in profile and skeets.
go.bsky.app/9RdjmCX