Mountains in Texas? Dermatophyllum secundiflorum (Fabaceae), to most Texans commonly known as the ‘Texas mountain laurel’, is a small, evergreen tree that is planted in various regions of Texas and northern Mexico. Its fragrant purple flowers, which are aggregated into long racemes, and its comparatively high drought tolerance make this plant a popular ornamental plant. […]
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Visualizing plant collection sites on a map
Image metadata can be both scary and useful Assume that you are a field botanist on an expedition and that you take photographs of every collection site that you visit. The metadata that is routinely stored as part of your photograph can be used to visualize your collection sites on a map. For example, the […]
The petal color of Texas bluebonnets
Not always blue. Lupinus texensis (Fabaceae), commonly known as the Texas bluebonnet, is the official state flower (or rather, state plant) of Texas. Given its vernacular name, many people would expect the flower color (or more precisely, the petal color) of Lupinus texensis to be blue. More often than not, the petal color of that […]
Collecting plants for my lab course
Selecting what my be pedagogically valuable Currently, I am teaching a lab course on plant morphology and biodiversity. In order for my students to work on live plant material, I have spent a lot of time in the greenhouses of the Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem to select appropriate study objects. Here are some […]
Water Lilies in the morning
The early botanist catches the data This week I collected some live plant material from our fantastic collection of water lilies for future sequencing of complete chloroplast genomes. Among the specimens collected was also the white water lily (Nymphaea ampla DC.), an enigmatic species that grows throughout Mesoamerica and that seems to have […]
Schematic of Plastid Genome in LaTeX
Professional graphics require code In order to visualize the location of oligonucleotide primers as well as structural rearrangements in plastid genomes, I wrote some Latex code. \documentclass[margin=10pt]{standalone} \usepackage{tikz} \begin{document} \begin{tikzpicture}[line cap=rect,line width=3pt] \draw[] (0,0) circle [radius=8cm]; % Draw small intervals, label small intervals \foreach \angle [count=\xi, evaluate=\xi as \xx using int(\xi*10)] in {157.5,135,…,-157.5,-180}{ \draw[line width=1.5pt] […]
Displaying phylogeny over map
A brief, preliminary evaluation For the revision of a new manuscript, I needed to generate a figure, in which a phylogenetic tree is plotted over a geographic map. The tips of the tree shall hereby point to the distribution area of the taxa they represent on the underlying map. Lucky for me, Rod Page has […]
Generating automatic figure labels
Following the German motto “Ordnung ist das halbe Leben!” Have you ever been frustrated by having to differentiate between dozens of similar graphs or figures, and the only memorable difference between them were their unique file names? In a recent simulation study, I had exactly that feeling, so I came up with some code to […]
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