Our President, Dr Micheline Sheehy Skeffington, and two of our trustees - Dr Sandy Knapp OBE and Richard Allanach - are present, and Richard has sent the following report and photographs from the first two days of the Congress:
"Three thousand botanists gathered together (image on right) in Madrid yesterday for the opening of the twentieth International Botanical Congress. The opening address was given by Sandra Knapp (image below left) of the Natural History Museum in London, who among many other roles is also a trustee of the BSBI. Sandra's title was 'Why Botany, Why Now?' She spoke for an hour throwing out ideas as rapidly as a bank of gorse throws out seeds on a warm summer's day.
The International Botanical Congress only takes place every six years. The last event was in China and
the next will be in South Africa. Botanists from Britain and Ireland make up
the fourth largest delegation to the Congress.
The BSBI's poster (image below left) on our Plant Atlas 2020 project was unveiled at the XX International Botany Congress in Madrid on Monday. It immediately caught the interest of two passing specialists in the Droseraceae. The Australian botanist was interested in the contrast between the distribution of sundews in our islands and those in Australia.
Whilst here sundews seem to prefer the wetter, colder areas where the botanist's boot sinks deep into the underlying bog, in Australia they have a much wider distribution with some establishing themselves on rocks where they are exposed to drought for months at a time. The word from our Trans-Atlantic sundew expert was that our Plant Atlas was 'cool'."
Many thanks to Richard for this report! Readers of this blog already know that Plant Atlas 2020 is very cool, but it's good to know that botanists from the other side of the world are in agreement. You can follow the latest news from the Congress on X under the #IBC2024 hashtag.
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