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Botany

Plantae — kingdom of the photosynthetic eukaryotes

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This Shipslides page presents Botany as an interactive HTML presentation deck in the Nature catalog with 15 slides. The share page keeps the uploaded deck sandboxed while exposing readable context, topics, and a slide outline for viewers and search engines.

Plantae — kingdom of the photosynthetic eukaryotes Key sections include: Botany; I · The Green Kingdom; Photosynthesis; III · Anatomy of a Leaf; IV · The Major Families; V · Specimen — Welwitschia mirabilis; VI · The Numbers; VII · Photographic Record; VIII · Linnaeus; IX · Ethnobotany.

Key sections

  • 01Botany
  • 02I · The Green Kingdom
  • 03Photosynthesis
  • 04III · Anatomy of a Leaf
  • 05IV · The Major Families
  • 06V · Specimen — Welwitschia mirabilis
  • 07VI · The Numbers
  • 08VII · Photographic Record
  • 09VIII · Linnaeus
  • 10IX · Ethnobotany
  • 11X · The Crops That Built Civilization
  • 12XI · Plant Communication
  • 13XII · Watch
  • 14The Private Life of Plants — David Attenborough
  • 15XIII · Coda — The Hidden Life

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Slide outline
  1. 01Botany
  2. 02I · The Green Kingdom
  3. 03Photosynthesis
  4. 04III · Anatomy of a Leaf
  5. 05IV · The Major Families
  6. 06V · Specimen — Welwitschia mirabilis
  7. 07VI · The Numbers
  8. 08VII · Photographic Record
  9. 09VIII · Linnaeus
  10. 10IX · Ethnobotany
  11. 11X · The Crops That Built Civilization
  12. 12XI · Plant Communication
  13. 13XII · Watch
  14. 14The Private Life of Plants — David Attenborough
  15. 15XIII · Coda — The Hidden Life
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Presentation Transcript

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Slide 01

I · The Green Kingdom

  • Plants invented chlorophyll roughly 1.5 billion years ago, fixed atmospheric oxygen, and made all subsequent animal life possible. The land plants — embryophytes — descended from a single freshwater green algal ancestor about 470 million years ago. Today there are ~400,000 known species; perhaps 100,000 still undescribed.
  • Plants do not move, but they do not need to. They make their own food, defend themselves chemically, communicate by airborne molecules and through fungal networks, and outlive almost everything else.
Slide 02

Photosynthesis

  • The most important chemical reaction on Earth, expressed in one balanced equation:
  • 6 CO₂ + 6 H₂O + light → C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6 O₂
  • Inside chloroplasts, the light reactions split water on the thylakoid membranes (releasing O₂); the Calvin cycle uses ATP and NADPH to fix carbon into sugars in the stroma. Discovered piecewise: Joseph Priestley (1772, plants restore "vitiated" air); Jan Ingenhousz (1779, the role of light); Melvin Calvin (Nobel 1961, the carbon-fixation pathway).
  • Three pathways: C3 (most plants), C4 (corn, sugarcane, drought-adapted), CAM (succulents, cactus — open stomata at night).
Slide 03

III · Anatomy of a Leaf

  • Cross-section of a typical dicot leaf: cuticle (waxy, water-tight), epidermis (one cell thick, transparent), palisade mesophyll (densely packed chloroplasts, photosynthetic powerhouse), spongy mesophyll (gas exchange), and on the underside, stomata guarded by paired bean-shaped cells that open and close.
  • Veins carry water in (xylem) and sugars out (phloem) — the same vascular logic seen at the level of the whole tree.
Slide 04

IV · The Major Families

  • Asteraceae
  • Daisy/Aster
  • Largest family — 32,000 spp. Sunflower, dandelion, lettuce.
  • Orchidaceae
  • Orchid
  • 28,000 spp. Vanilla, tropical canopies.
  • Fabaceae
  • Legume
  • 19,500 spp. Bean, pea, acacia, clover. N-fixers.
  • Poaceae
  • Grass
  • 12,000 spp. Wheat, rice, corn, bamboo.
  • Rosaceae
  • Rose
  • ~3,000 spp. Apple, almond, cherry, strawberry.
  • Solanaceae
  • Nightshade
  • ~2,700 spp. Tomato, potato, tobacco, pepper.
  • Brassicaceae
  • Mustard
  • ~4,000 spp. Cabbage, broccoli, Arabidopsis.
  • Lamiaceae
  • Mint
  • ~7,500 spp. Basil, lavender, sage, thyme.
Slide 05

V · Specimen — Welwitschia mirabilis

  • "The most wonderful plant ever brought to this country, and one of the ugliest." — Joseph Hooker, 1862
  • An endemic of the Namib Desert. Two strap-like leaves grow continuously from a woody crown for the entire life of the plant — up to 2,000 years. No close living relatives; sole species in its genus, sole genus in its family, sole family in its order. A living fossil of the Gnetophyta. Survives on coastal fog.
Slide 06

VI · The Numbers

  • ~400,000
  • Plant species described
  • ~30%
  • At risk of extinction
  • ~80%
  • Land plant biomass on Earth
  • ~2,000
  • New species described per year
  • ~115m
  • Tallest tree (Sequoia)
  • 5,072
  • Methuselah pine, BCE 2832
Slide 07

VII · Photographic Record

  • Fern unfurling — fiddlehead stage. Ferns predate seed plants; the first fossil ferns are ~360 million years old.
Slide 08

VIII · Linnaeus

  • Carl von Linné (1707–1778) gave us the system. Two-name binomial nomenclature. Homo sapiens. Quercus alba. He inspected, named, and classified at a pace bordering on mania — over 7,700 plant and 4,400 animal species in his lifetime, often sleeping with specimens. Systema Naturae went through 13 editions; Species Plantarum (1753) is taxonomy's year zero for plants.
  • Modern molecular phylogenetics has redrawn many of his relationships, but his framework — kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species — endures. Botany speaks Latin because Linnaeus did.
  • Quercus alba L.
  • Family: Fagaceae
  • Order: Fagales
  • Class: Magnoliopsida
  • Division: Tracheophyta
  • Kingdom: Plantae
  • ────
  • Type locality: Eastern N. America
Slide 09

IX · Ethnobotany

  • The study of how people use plants. Aspirin was distilled from willow bark (Salix) — Hippocrates wrote of it 2,400 years ago. Quinine from Cinchona bark (Peruvian Andes) treated malaria for four centuries. Vincristine and vinblastine from the Madagascar periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus) revolutionized childhood leukemia treatment. Taxol from the Pacific yew (Taxus brevifolia) — anti-cancer chemotherapy.
  • Estimated >25% of modern pharmaceuticals derive from plant compounds. Ethnobotanists Mark Plotkin and Wade Davis argue that every shaman who dies takes a library with him.
Slide 10

X · The Crops That Built Civilization

  • Wheat (Triticum aestivum) — domesticated Fertile Crescent ~10,000 BCE
  • Rice (Oryza sativa) — Yangtze valley ~9,000 BCE; feeds half humanity
  • Maize (Zea mays) — Balsas River, Mexico ~9,000 BCE; from teosinte
  • Potato (Solanum tuberosum) — Andes ~8,000 BCE; 4,000+ varieties survive in Peru
  • Soybean (Glycine max) — northeast China ~7,000 BCE; now world's #1 protein crop
  • Nikolai Vavilov, the Soviet botanist, mapped the world's "centers of crop origin" in the 1920s and 30s — and built the world's first seed bank in Leningrad. Stalin had him arrested in 1940; he died in prison in 1943. His staff, during the 872-day siege of Leningrad, starved to death rather than eat the seeds they were guarding.
Slide 11

XI · Plant Communication

  • Acacia trees grazed by giraffe release ethylene gas; downwind acacias detect it and pre-emptively pump tannins into their leaves, making them inedible. This was first documented by Wouter Van Hoven in South Africa in 1990. Tomato plants attacked by caterpillars release jasmonate, summoning parasitoid wasps. Underground, mycorrhizal fungi shuttle warning signals between plants of the same and different species. Silent, but not solitary.
Slide 12

XII · Watch

  • BBC
  • The Private Life of Plants — David Attenborough
  • Time-lapse photography reveals strangler figs hunting their hosts, drosera trapping insects, dandelion seeds parachuting on thermals. Five episodes, every one a revelation. The series that made millions of viewers see plants as agents.
  • → youtube.com/watch?v=trWzDlRvv1M
Slide 13

XIII · Coda — The Hidden Life

  • German forester Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees (2015) brought the wood-wide-web findings of Suzanne Simard to a popular audience. Some scientists complain about the anthropomorphism. But what the work conveys is unimpeachable: trees are not isolated individuals competing for light, but networked communities exchanging carbon, nitrogen, and chemical warnings. Botany is the slow-motion science of this commons.
  • "The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture." — Thomas Jefferson
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