botanydepot
Chris MartineCategory: informal learning (not in classroom)
This teaching module uses the often hidden information about a plant, a place, and a person connected through a herbarium specimen and how students can investigate it. Herbarium…
Another amazing episode of the video series Plants are Cool, Too! is out, and this time Chris Martine goes to Hawaii. Highlighting one of the coolest and most…
Carmen Acedo at University of León, in León, Spain, has gracefully translated the manual The Naming of Plants into Spanish. We are making it available as a free…
Here is a list of Timothy Evans’ videos on Youtube, suitable for botany classes. They are filmed in temperate North America (Michigan, USA) and feature local plants. Dangerous…
Elizabeth J. Hermsen has provided great illustrated web-based introductions to plant systematics, anatomy and morphology as part of the Digital Encyclopedia of Ancient Life. These are great teaching…
Introduction to the manual Preparing a Press for a Plant Collection Assignment in a Remote Field Botany Course by Tobias Policha: Many of us include a collections assignment…
So much of documentation of biodiversity and educational projects today include digital images, but how do you take good photos of plants and features associated with plants (such…
Lena Struwe’s lab group at Rutgers University has developed several resources about common weeds of northeastern North America and these are shared with the public here. They were…
In this activity college students go outside and find ten street trees near their home or school, photograph them, identify them to species, and map them on a…
What kind of and how much botanical diversity can you find in the products in a a home, or just in a bathroom, freezer, fridge, or pantry? Go…
This iNaturalist plant observation assignment for college students was developed by Aaron Liston from Oregon State University. It was designed to replace a traditional collection assignment. The students…
Here is an alternative bingo sheet to the previously posted iNaturalist Species Bingo Project. I will post other species bingo sheets in this blog post when they are…
UPDATE: Unfortunately TimeGlider was bought, then the new owner decided to shut the website down in Dec 2020. I have a CSV of the downloaded data, but there…
Looking for images of dissected flowers that you can turn 360 degrees to understand how flowers are constructed? Look no more. John Riley and Benjamin R. Montgomery at…
This is an assignment I use in my Plant Diversity and Evolution class the week before they start their iNaturalist project. The students learn how to take great…
This activity uses the citizen science tool iNaturalist for a project for high school and college students that focus on species discovery and identification. Observations are uploaded to…
How did the word ‘herbarium’ come to be? It actually has ancient roots in the deep history of Indo-European languages, and its origin and formation in Latin is…
Looking for a non-technical beginners and intermediate users manual in plant nomenclature that explains scientific names, common names, cultivated and trade names, and what changes in plant classifications…
In identification keys and species descriptions around the world, measurements are usually in the metric system, the universal system for scientific measurements. US students often do not have…
Emergency Room (ER) toxic plant role play for Botany classes Developed by Dr. Lena Struwe (lena.struwe@rutgers.edu) This is the activity I presented at the Botany 2018 meeting as…
This innovative book and its 52 playing cards with flowers and families on them comes with instructions for 5 different card games to enhance learning of major family…
The new 6th edition of this well-known book by Thomas Elpel follows the APG system (a phylogenetic classification system now used worldwide) and provides easy to access information…
Key concept: Understanding and remembering order of events and time line for Earth’s geological and biological history. This is the handout for an exercise I do in my…
Get your students to run around outside the classroom and dig through the weeds in the lawns to find examples of obtuse, spinose, calyx, capsule, stamen, trichome, and…
Weeds are everywhere and people like to taste new things, so why not combine the two? Here is an article that explains how we did it at Rutgers…
Want to travel back in botanical history with watercolor or coloring pens? Here are some illustrious handouts for students in many subjects (medicine, gardening, pharmacology, botany, history…), as…
Key concept: How pitcher plants lure, trap, and digest insect prey… with the help of millions of mystery microbes. Guest expert for this episode of “Plants are Cool,…
Key concept: Most plant fossils are impressions, but the ones in Clarkia, Idaho are actual leaves encased in rock for the last 15 millions years… and we might…