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Laura Jennings

@botanistlaura.bsky.social
359 followers 130 following 135 posts

Botanist at Kew working on the conservation of New Guinea plants

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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Mesmerising. The music and editing are clearly from 1963, but the visuals seem older, especially the workmen shovelling snow (no gloves!).
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Robin Hayward 🌳 🏳️‍⚧️ @canopyrobin.com · 25/09/2026
We're publishing new guidance to support trans people who do fieldwork (any work outside the office)! Now we need your help to get them seen so please share! inclusivefieldwork.leeds.ac.uk/trans/
a cartoon of three fieldworkers. One has a small trans flag. The logos of the university of leeds, research england, and canopy robin are shown, as well as the URL: InclusiveFieldwork (dot) Leeds (dot) AC (dot) UK (slash) trans
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Ashmolean Museum, Oxford @ashmoleanmuseum.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
A little pinch of the crabs in our collection 🦀 🦀 Bronze box in the form of a Crab, 16th or 17th century, northern Italy. Bronze, 15.5 cm x 12.8 cm. WA1947.191.174 🦀 Study of a Velvet Crab, 1870, by John Ruskin (1819–1900). Bodycolour over graphite on blue wove paper. WA.RS.ED.199
A bronze box in the form of a crabAn artwork by John Ruskin of a Velvet Crab against a light blue background.A Japanese fuchi, black with a gold crab detail.A Japanese colour woodblock prink of a woman in traditional dress sat on the ground surrounded by crabs.
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Cool new parasitic plant, looks to me like a cute angry owl
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Seems like something vital, I assumed this would already exist for such a well-researched group as birds
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
Natee's skills are next level (look at the fluffy scales on the butterfly!)
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
Which TV series names survive contact with my spouse's odd brain? ❌️ Smallville = Muscle man ❌️ Big Bang Theory = Space Junk ❌️ Game of Thrones = Lord of the Thrones ❌️ The Good Place = Afterlife ✅️ Friends ✅️ Brooklyn 99 = 99 (close enough)
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
Does anyone know why this is? It seems to be common but I don't understand where it comes from
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
I'm at a conference with a disappointing number of AI infographics and I'm compiling a collection called "AI thinks data is cylindrical"
Collage of 4 heavily cropped photos with text that suggests datasets and digitization, all with the same bizarre stacked cylinders to illustrate it
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Botany One @botany.one · 29/06/2026
The Ecology of a Herbarium: How Te Papa connects plants, people, and data www.botany.one/the-ecology-... From seaweed watercolours to global biodiversity databases, Te Papa’s herbarium shows how digital botany can make plant collections more accessible, connected and alive. #Botany #PlantScience
botany.one
The Ecology of a Herbarium: How Te Papa connects plants, people, and data
From seaweed watercolours to global biodiversity databases, Te Papa’s herbarium shows how digital botany can make plant collections more accessible, connected and alive.
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
I do not think enough non-essential things are being cancelled during the red warnings! If you would cancel for red warning of a flood or storm you should cancel for heat! [brought to you by my spouse's meeting 1.5 hrs drive away still being on]
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Dave Hemprich-Bennett @davehb.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
It's now forecast to be 40 degrees here on Thursday. Our average daily high temperature for this time of year is 18. So angry for all of the people who're going to be unnecessarily harmed by this. So angry for our ecosystems that have not remotely evolved for this.
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Veeloxxy Bites @the-episiarch.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
The Secret Life of Lathraea: I've written a post about the common toothwort (Lathraea squamaria), a parasitic plant which parasitises deciduous trees and is mostly found in alluvial and ravine forests. 🧪 dailyparasite.blogspot.com/2026/06/lath...
dailyparasite.blogspot.com
<i>Lathraea squamaria</i>
When it comes to parasites, for most people it is a case of "out of sight, out of mind", and that especially applies to holoparasitic plants...
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Alison Atkin @alisonatkin.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
After studying with friends the other day, I want to know... what are some of the mnemonics you've used when studying another language (any language)? (Mine) Spanish: Llevar: LeVar Burton sure could Carry me Llegar: if you Go somewhere, you will Arrive there Llenar: Nar thanks, I'm Full
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Dan McCrum @mccrum.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
For all would-be SpaceX investors, reading "A City on Mars" is a strong recommend. Very funny on the many ways space is terrible, uneconomic, and the decades/centuries of (boring, non-phallic rocket related) research needed to make settlement even a vaguely realistic proposition.
A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space and have we really thought this through?
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BirdLife International @birdlifeglobal.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
FOUND! 🔍 Indonesia’s Blue-fronted Lorikeet 🦜 Hidden in the remote highlands of Mount Kapalatmada in Buru, Indonesia, the Blue-fronted Lorikeet has re-emerged after missing for more than a decade. 👀 Learn more here👉 www.birdlife.org/lorikeet-red... @abcbirds.bsky.social @rewildorg.bsky.social
birdlife.org
Indonesia’s Blue-fronted Lorikeet found in unexplored forest
New records provide proof that the lost bird Blue-fronted Lorikeet persists in Buru’s highlands.
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da share z0ne @dasharez0ne.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
GARBAGE - dashare.zone ADMIN
A SKELTEN AT THERE DESK FEELEN LIKE A ANCIENT MAN BECAUSE THERE SO TIRED OF ALL DA A.I SHIT EVERY COMPANY IS TRYING TO PUSH, THEY WANT TO JAM IT IN EVERY WEB SITE AND EVERY APP, ANY WAY IT SAYS "I DONT WANT GMAIL TO TALK TO ME, I DONT WANT TO ASK GMAIL ANY THING, YOU ARE A TRASH CAN FOR RECEIPTS AND ADS, IM NOT INTERESTED IN TALKING TO THE RECYCLING BIN EITHER " - MORE WRITTING ABOUT THIS AT patreon.com/dasharez0ne - DASHARE.ZONE ADMIN
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SwearyMess @swearymess.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
This is SO important. www.euansguide.com/safertoilets
euansguide.com
Euan's Guide
Making the world more accessible one review at a time.
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
Aw yeah paint / pigment chemistry! With a side of 'chemicals' does equal bad, and 'natural' does not equal harmless.
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Joshua Lüdtke @joshualudtke.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Worst thing about this post is that everyone in academia is aware of at least one case in the past and one case in the present. The systemic nature of the offensive activity is truly sinister.
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 02/05/2026
Haha I had no idea an old tamagochi looked like a buff shark with a moustache
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
I have enjoyed getting to know Jakarta a little bit but this is definitely needed, it's a terrible place to be a pedestrian. OP's other post talks about the improvement in train coverage since 2015.
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Covering Climate Now @coveringclimatenow.org · 18/04/2026
Deforestation in Indonesia surged 66% from 2024 to 2025, when more than 433,000 hectares were lost, according to the NGO Auriga Nusantara. The country reached historic low deforestation in 2021, when around 230,000 hectares were cleared. By Hans Nicholas Jong for @mongabay.com:
buff.ly
Indonesia’s deforestation surges 66% in 2025
A sharp reversal after several years of decline, according to new data from the NGO Auriga Nusantara.…
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
Even in the super touristy islands of Bali and Lombok there are plant species which haven't been collected for over 100 years. Our new checklist highlights all the plants found in the Lesser Sundas (southern Indonesia and Timor-Leste) and nowhere else in the world.
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Sarah Hörst @planetdr.bsky.social · 11/04/2026
Things that work: giant rocket, very precise math, orbital mechanics, cameras, iPhones Things that don’t work: Microsoft Outlook, toilets, sat phones
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
New paper! A checklist of the plants endemic to the Lesser Sunda Islands (S Indonesia and Timor-Leste). For conservation we need to know where these plants are and if they are threatened, and we know so little about either. 51 species haven't been seen in >120 years! doi.org/10.3897/phyt...
Greyscale map of the Lesser Sunda islands (the island chain between Bali and Timor) with orange dots representing mapped herbarium specimen collections
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
New paper! A checklist of the plants endemic to the Lesser Sunda Islands (S Indonesia and Timor-Leste). For conservation we need to know where these plants are and if they are threatened, and we know so little about either. 51 species haven't been seen in >120 years! doi.org/10.3897/phyt...
Greyscale map of the Lesser Sunda islands (the island chain between Bali and Timor) with orange dots representing mapped herbarium specimen collections
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
While space is in the news: A City on Mars is a fun and accessible read about the biological (and legal) realities of humans space flight
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
This thread and the Zachary Taylor paper mentioned here are great reads (link in case you have access / can find elsewhere doi.org/10.1016/j.ac... )
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Cameron Blevins @cblevins.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
This is so, so well-articulated.
People call this friction "grunt work." Schwartz uses exactly that phrase, and he's right that LLMs can remove it. What he doesn't say, because he already has decades of hard-won intuition and doesn't need the grunt work anymore, is that for someone who doesn't yet have that intuition, the grunt work is the work. The boring parts and the important parts are tangled together in a way that you can't separate in advance. You don't know which afternoon of debugging was the one that taught you something fundamental about your data until three years later, when you're working on a completely different problem and the insight surfaces. Serendipity doesn't come from efficiency. It comes from spending time in the space where the problem lives, getting your hands dirty, making mistakes that nobody asked you to make and learning things nobody assigned you to learn.
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
I think "you cannot kill me in a way that matters" every time I see a mushroom
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
Maybrat is in the central Bird's Head and the whole area is gazetted for logging. If they're finding undescribed mammals imagine how many plants / beetles / fish there are.
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Josh Luke Davis 🏳️‍🌈 @joshlukedavis.com · 05/03/2026
"Two charismatic marsupial species that had been thought extinct for 6,000 years are alive in rainforest in remote West Papua." Oh yeah this is super cool as both the pygmy long-fingered possum and ring-tailed glider were previously only known from fossils 🤯🧪🐀 www.theguardian.com/environment/...
theguardian.com
Marsupials previously thought extinct for millennia discovered in New Guinea
The chances of finding one mammal species thought to be lost was ‘almost zero’ and finding two is ‘unprecedented’, biologist Tim Flannery says
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Werewolven Daughter @wolvendaughter.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
"I asked Chat GPT and -" ok, I asked the exhumed corpse of Pope Formosus during the Cadaver Synod and he went "... ... ..." and then his jaw fell off and it was still a better answer
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Josh Luke Davis 🏳️‍🌈 @joshlukedavis.com · 16/02/2026
oh yeah this is actually a really interesting case about not only who owns the data in these museums, but what happens when one government goes into a public-private partnership the Belgian museum wants to digitise and openly publish this data themselves, but the private company maybe less so...
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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
I know it’s intentional but we should stop calling everything AI, lumping useful machine learning techniques for science with large language models that tech companies are trying to cram into everything.
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Dr. Brendan Anderson @fossilsndcoffee.bsky.social · 01/02/2026
TLDR; it is too early to stop doing taxonomic & natural history work and exclusively do meta-analysis; our existing datasets are highly structured & biology is weird. we shouldn't assume we already know enough to extrapolate a species' needs for conservation- we still need taxonomy & autecology
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
It's a 'science publishing is broken' story but I am really in support of a quality acronym
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Suz Everingham @suzeveringham.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
Drought is often omitted from IUCN Red Listing assessments as it is difficult to quantify. But our study has found that >95% of threatened species will be exposed to longer and more frequent droughts! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Exposure and sensitivity of threatened plant species to changing drought regimes: A global analysis
Climate change is driving substantial impacts on plants, including widespread increases in drought frequency, duration, and intensity. Changes to thes…
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andrew john lamb @andyjlamb.bsky.social · 31/12/2025
This “Biotech” has raised more than half a billion USD. Imagine what real conservation work that could fund.
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Teresa Rose Osborne @trosborne.bsky.social · 24/12/2025
2025 was a year of progress & discoveries for akaleha' tree snail conservation here in the CNMI 🐌 Akaleha' are tree snails in Family Partulidae native to the Mariana Islands🇲🇵🇬🇺 To count down the new year, Here's our Top 10 Akaleha' Conservation Moments of 2025 #InverteFest #JoyOfMolluscs
Collage of akaleha’ luta (Rota tree snails, Partula lutaensis) from Rota Island.
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Marc Burrows @20thcenturymarc.marcburrows.co.uk · 24/12/2025
Okay, I need your help. If everyone buys my book on Kindle today (for 99p), it could push it back to number one on the Music chart and I'd HAVE A CHRISTMAS NUMBER ONE. I would really, really, really like that for Christmas. 99p! www.amazon.co.uk/Story-Christ...
amazon.co.uk
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 20/12/2025
This is so great! Especially the stylised lettering, even though I don't know what it says
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Natee (they/them) @himmapaan.bsky.social · 23/12/2023
"You saved me," he said. "Not just from the Mouse King - from a terrible curse, too. Will you do me the honour of accompanying me to my home, the Land of Sweets?" They travelled by swan over gold-flecked oceans & silver-edged cities. 4/ #ArtAdventCalendar #NHPNutcracker
4th spread of The Nutcracker, illustrated by me, published by Walker Books, 2015.

Ink, watercolour, and gouache on Arches hot pressed paper. 

Silhouette illustration with elements in colour. Seven swans fly amid the falling snow through the night sky over a river with a beautiful cityscape. The leading Swan, with a crown on its head, bears Clara and the Nutcracker Prince.
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Evolution Letters @evolletters.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
Check out our cover article by @timjanicke.bsky.social and colleagues about the role of sexual selection in animal speciation. academic.oup.com/evlett/artic.... The beautiful illustration is by Katharina Bóth.
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 28/11/2025
Introduce yourself with five animals you have seen in the wild: Green turtle Magnificent Bird of Paradise Purple Spotted Swallowtail Rothschild's giraffe Tawny Hermit Crab
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
The number of natural history specimens collected has fallen off a cliff in the 21st century. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Global sampling decline erodes science potential of natural history collections - Nature Communications
Natural history collections hold over two billion specimens representing Earth’s biodiversity, but their scientific value depends on continued specimen collection and digitisation. This study demonstr...
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 15/11/2025
This is beautiful but my first thought was pandan cake
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Laura Jennings @botanistlaura.bsky.social · 15/11/2025
I enjoyed this, it's always great to hear people enthuse about plants (this one's Dactylanthus, Balanophoraceae), the NZ accents are also lovely
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