Berry Go Round #12

The 12th edition of Berry Go Round, the botanical blog carnival, is now online at Foothills Fancies.  Lots of good reading to be had.

Evolution and conservation in Mexican dry forests

Bursera simaruba has always been one of my favourite tree species. It’s a dry-season deciduous tree with compound leaves and a coppery peeling outer bark and a green (presumably photosynthetic) inner bark.  It’s a conspicuous element of tropical dry forests in Trinidad and Tobago, Puerto Rico and parts of southern Florida (where they call it [...]

New plant blog

I discovered a new plant blog today, an apparently unnamed blog dedicated to “to edible, medicinal and otherwise useful tropical plant species and how they can be (and are being) integrated into diverse small and large scale agroforestry systems in both rural and urban environments”.  For want of a better name, I’ll call it Anthrome, [...]

Oekologie #19

Edition #19 of the Oekologie blog carnival is up at Greg Laden’s blog.  There’s lots of great stuff there, like Grrlscientist’s post on the evolution of poisonous birds, or a post from Sustainable Design Update on using coffee grounds as a source of biodiesel, or Greg Laden’s Congo Memoirs, or… Go.  Read.

Ideas in Ecology and Evolution

Ideas in Ecology and Evolution is a new open-access journal which “publishes only short forum-style articles that develop new ideas or that involve original commentaries on any topics within the broad domains of fundamental or applied ecology or evolution”.  They also have an interesting review process:
Referees for Ideas in Ecology and Evolution are not anonymous; [...]

PLoS ONE Synchroblogging contest

In a world of ever-increasing journal subscription prices, there’s a real need for an alternative model.  Pricer journal subscriptions have led libraries to narrow the range of journals to which they subscribe.  Much of the scientific literature is out of reach for institutions in poorer countries.  Researchers working in these settings are less able to [...]

Open-access journal portal

OpenJ-Gate, which bills itself as “the world’s biggest open access English language journals portal” , provides access to 4649 “academic, research and industry journals”, 2,528 of which are peer-reviewed.  The site is run by Informatics India in support of the Open Access Initiative.
If you’re looking for open-access journals, it’s probably the place to start.  You [...]

On science reporting – and blogging, no doubt

Deborah Howell, the Washington Post’s Ombudsman, took a look at science reporting.  She opens by saying:
The job of science reporters is to take complicated subjects and translate them for readers who are not scientifically sophisticated. Critics say that the news media oversimplify and aren’t skeptical enough of financing by special interests.
Howell’s article, while it seems [...]

Festival of the Trees

Festival of the Trees #30 is up at A Neotropical Savanna.  There’s some great stuff there, including some great photography.
The Festival of the Trees blog carnival has acught my eye a couple times, but I have never clicked through and taken a good look at it.  Much to my loss.  It looks like the kind [...]

The best of science blogging

The submission deadline for the Open Laboratory 2008 science bloggin anthology has passed, and Bora has posted a complete list of the submissions.  Five hundred (or so) of the best science blog posts of the last year.  As Laurent described it, “it’s like a Carnival”.  It’s also a good place to go and update your [...]