Genome size is positively correlated with extinction risk in herbaceous angiosperms.

Angiosperms with large genomes experience nuclear-, cellular-, and organism-level constraints that may limit their phenotypic plasticity and ecological niche, which could increase their risk of extinction. Therefore, we test the hypotheses that large-genomed species are more likely to be threatened with extinction than those with small genomes, and that the effect of genome size varies across three selected covariates: life form, endemism, and climatic zone. We collated genome size and extinction risk information for a representative sample of angiosperms comprising 3250 species, which we analyzed alongside life form, endemism, and climatic zone variables using a phylogenetic framework.

Extinction risk predictions for the world's flowering plants to support their conservation.

More than 70% of all vascular plants lack conservation status assessments. We aimed to address this shortfall in knowledge of species extinction risk by using the World Checklist of Vascular Plants to generate the first comprehensive set of predictions for a large clade: angiosperms (flowering plants, c. 330 000 species).

Setting the research agenda: involving parents in research on children who are HIV-free.

Introduction: There is growing interest in health, developmental and survival outcomes of children who are born HIV-free to women living with HIV (children born HIV-free). To date, the research agenda has been largely determined by researchers, funders and policy makers, with limited involvement of parents, who are key stakeholders. Researchers at UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health in partnership with community-based organisation 4M Network of Mentor Mothers conducted two workshops with parents in March 2022 to establish research priorities for children born HIV-free, and key considerations for methodological approaches both to research and engagement with the affected communities.

Re-evaluating the importance of threatened species in maintaining global phytoregions.

Anthropogenic introductions are known to be changing the structure of global phytogeographical regions (phytoregions), but previous studies have been limited by incomplete or biased data sets that are likely to underestimate the importance of threatened species. In this work, we analyse a comprehensive data set of all known species and their occurrences (at botanical country resolution) to quantify the impact of potential future extinction scenarios. We used Infomap, a network-based community detection algorithm, to generate phytoregional delineations for six species-distribution scenarios (native, introduced and extinctions of species that are either documented as threatened or likely to be threatened, as well as combinations thereof).

rWCVP: a companion R package for the World Checklist of Vascular Plants.

The World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP) is an extremely valuable resource that is being used to address many fundamental and applied questions in plant science, conservation, ecology and evolution. However, databases of this size require data manipulation skills that pose a barrier to many potential users. Here, we present rWCVP, an open-source R package that aims to facilitate the use of the WCVP by providing clear, intuitive functions to execute many common tasks.

No cell is an island: characterising the leaf epidermis using epidermalmorph, a new R package.

The leaf epidermis is the interface between a plant and its environment. The epidermis is highly variable in morphology, with links to both phylogeny and environment, and this diversity is relevant to several fields, including physiology, functional traits, palaeobotany, taxonomy and developmental biology. Describing and measuring leaf epidermal traits remains challenging.

Conduit position and connectivity affect the likelihood of xylem embolism during natural drought in evergreen woodland species.

Background And Aims: Hydraulic failure is considered a main cause of drought-induced forest mortality. Yet, we have a limited understanding of how the varying intensities and long time scales of natural droughts induce and propagate embolism within the xylem.

Methods: X-ray computed tomography (microCT) images were obtained from different aged branch xylem to study the number, size and spatial distribution of in situ embolized conduits among three dominant tree species growing in a woodland community.