alt Hacker NewsCrime Pays but Botany Doesn't
Comments
Odd to see one of the best native plant communicators referenced on HN but I'll use to opportunity to mention a side project I'd been delaying diving in for years and finally committed to recently if there are folks here who want to not only learn to identify crucial native flora (and fauna) but contribute to restoring local native plants that are critical to ecosystems.
So, mini show HN: https://indigene.app is a browser-only, offline & mobile-friendly, no account, no ads, open source tool to help you find native plants that would thrive exactly where you are. I've tried to make it as thoroughly sourced as possible but focus heavily on folks that have less experience with gardening and native plants in general.
I've been adding coverage to a handful of US and French ecoregions for now (what I know) and you can already do plant lookups by GPS, postal code, and ecoregion). The app will help you identify you spot, sun, soil, and specific ecosystem support goals (wildlife, birds, erosion or runoff control, growth) and offer a sortable list you can fine-tune with requirements (max height/width, no thorns, pet safe, spread, zero watering, etc.).
There's a lot more in there I've wanted for years like bloom windows, host species counts, dependent native wildlife, growth-over-time charts, propagation tips, and tons of sourced references that overlap with a lot of the resources Joey Santore and other native plant folks reference.
None of this replaces useful tools like iNaturalist whose excellent open API I use to show what native plants look like in Indigene, but hopefully it encourages folks who have the means and the time to start rebuilding local ecosystems we've neglected or actively destroyed.
PS: because I can't help it, the app has detailed release notes gendered from its changelog at https://indigene.app/release-notes/. It also takes privacy & safety very seriously: https://indigene.app/privacy
I think nature and plants always interested me since I was a kid. For example I loved to plant from seeds, see them grow, learn and explore a bit with curiosity my mum or aunt plants and when being out in the forest, but not a lot more than that.
Later, while growing up, I noticed my brain noticing plants or tree details, auto mapping them to possible genre, trying to find out, trying to memorize... but not always voluntarily, meaning that i felt like I was much more attracted and focused on plants and tree details and recognition after a certain age.
Something similar happened with birds, my brain started recording and recognizing the different birds sounds, and I started recognizing birds types more. Like something that before was a random signal or a bunch of sounds suddenly with age started having patterns and clear distinctions that attracted my brain and memory, and I simply started being able to distinguish birds by just hearing them.
I love it, I observe, I listen, I learn. I use the plant apps and birdnet for the bird soiunds (from CornellLab and Technical university of Chemnitz). Cool projects, lovely apps and interesting tech usage. I'm planning to upgrade terrace with constant camera feed for auto-detection.
But the main point is, does anybody relate to this grown interest to plants and bird distinction with age? is it something known and defined? it kinda feels like part of a biological evolution related to age, but no idea.
I can strongly recommend the mobile app Flora Incognita for quickly identifying plants. It’s made by one of the German universities so it’s free, don’t have ads, and don’t collect your personal data. I even showed it to my mum and she loves it
He's great, I love his concrete botany videos about weeds thriving in harsh human environments. His tour of the Chicago River is great, and an NYC parking lot that has been taken back over by nature is fascinating.
Hort. Science degree from A&M in '80, employers offered to pay me $800 a month a water their greenhouses. Indeed, Botany was one of the more boring courses required. Scrapped by after the university as a landscaper-irrigator, then discovered too many years later the uber wealthy living on certain Texas Lakes would pay enormous sums to have me dive to service-install their pumps to feed raw water to their landscapes. Customers would call me in exasperation explaining they just got a water bill for like $900 to $1,000. Raw lake water was available at about $150 to $175 per 325,000 gallons with a permit. A lady I knew convinced me that horticulture, and especially botany, are "labors of love", not particularly a way to become financially successful.
Launching a thing soon to make it more accessible, without sacrificing scientific depth, eg:
https://www.meso.cloud/plants/tracheophyta/magnoliopsida/gen...
Aggregates 780k plants and fungi from many canonical sources (IPNI, Wikidata, GBIF, iNaturalist etc) and tries to present the data in an intuitive and engaging way, lets you search by common names in 300+ languages etc.
Feedback from especially botany nerds very welcome!
Watch this guy's YT channel - have been for years now. I think what originally caught my attention on his channel was a video specifically about the flora around run-down Oakland urban-industrial areas.
A friend from my youth always had an encyclopedic knowledge of plants, could identify them effortlessly just as we were walking around. I always envied him, but despite a love of plants, gardening, et cetera, I never went beyond a surface level until I started casually following Joey and CPBBD during COVID times. A big theme of what I've learned from him is how deeply geology is intertwined with plant evolution. Seems obvious once you hear it, but I genuinely never considered it until then.
At some point he taught an online course called "Blue Collar Botany" that went through plant ecology, evolution, identification, and other topics. It was fantastic, and finally got me into learning about the plants around me more rigorously. Years later, I still hear his voice in my head when I see certain parts of a plant like a laminar stamen. His affect is so unique that it actually helped me remember the content easier.
I don't know if he still teaches it or sells the videos from those sessions, but I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the natural world around them.
They spent a whole section glazing the Linnaeus system like it's a perfect thing, but as someone who has delved into taxonomy a lot (due to playing Metazooa and Metaflora), there are quite a few glaring issues with it.
1. political tussle. australian botanists managed to hijack the "acacia" name from the original African Acacia, to the totally unrelated australian plants that were also called acacia. I noticed that japanese botanists also have a habit of insular naming.
2. western bias. Names were given by the first white european man that "found" the plant, instead of the local inhabitants who have known and named the plants for thousands of years.
3. the eight rank taxonomy that only accidentally kinda work, but not really. The original ranks were domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Modern taxonomy only pays a glancing homage to this system, because the actual evolutionary path that we found out there doesn't care about this neat categorization system, and so we had to shoehorn in hacks in the form of sub-phylums, sub-classes, sub-sub-sub-families, and sub-species. We could probably come up with a better system using a tree coordinate system.
As a child of an entomologist turned botanist and another naturalist, who grew up in our home library full of assorted atlases, monographies and other odd books, I often learned the Latin names together with the respective common names, and it's amazing how it sticks. Being able to look at a random plant and say I don't know what it is exactly, but it's definitely labiaceae, is something I will always appreciate. Only recently my father sent me a video of a dormouse making themselves at home at a friend's cottage and my brain said "Glis glis". How I remembered it, I have no clue. I'm an IT person.
Joey is also an amazing fine and graffiti artist (ALONE)
https://www.publiclandstore.com/blogs/gallery/joey-alone-exh...
Great article with elements of "how to draw an owl" about it.
To be really good at botany is simple. Just learn how to be really good at {list of requirements which are themselves recursively complex and challenging, despite being written as one word like "learn"}If you watch only one video make it the Berkeley Bowl one
Haha, the Latin (or pseudo-Latin, I suppose) I like for the fact that it’s sufficiently alien to not introduce terminology confusion like “strawberries aren’t berries and pineapple is a berry” or whatever that is a colloquial language confusion.
Science does have a lot of weird terminology that can be improved, though. One example is the thing I’ve always known since a child as the Fallopian Tube. At some point in my twenties, I learned Eileter - egg carrier - and the subsequent term oviduct. I’m a huge fan of Germanic compound words since destructuring them gives you information on the object - the ovum tube. There is a commonality in terminology between different parts of the body and this concordance aids memory and recall.
A Fallopian Tube on the other hand implies some kind of membership of the group of Fallopes and has no function description.
Plant(ing) related: I planted 100 trees in my tiny back yard, creating a pocket forest / Miyawaki forest - a technique encouraging fast growth through dense planting (3-5 trees / shrubs per square meter). Routed my gutters into a swale along the tree line - looking forward to watching a forest appear over the next decade.
https://www.creatingtomorrowsforests.co.uk/blog/the-miyawaki...
I saw him talk at SF Nerd Nite years ago. Very entertaining and informative. The crazy thing is he's self taught. Smart man.
Slowly killing my lawn. Red bud trees will soon forest my property.
> "at the time, he was probably mostly thinking of “white European cultures”, and while we can acknowledge how backwards and fucking goofy this is now, we can still admit that Linnaeus’ ideology was simply flawed like his time and NOT throw out the baby with the proverbial bath water"
In the 18th century someone living in Europe making science books would definitely be using Latin, maybe French if you were a modernist, as that was the language of science publication and communication. I don't see how this is either backwards or goofy?
It's similar to use English on an internet blog post nowadays (as the author does), since there's many more Chinese or Spanish native speakers than English, but English IS the language of international communication.
glad to see this posted here on my day off! the universe seems to have a way of reminding of certain things and pointing me in the right direction!
I've recently taken to learning about plant identification, it's interesting to make observations about all the flora you see walking about. Will need to note these books for later!
So happy to see this Chanel posted. Love this guy!
One of my favorite channels of all time on youtube. You get to see new places, learn amazing botany facts, local history, and experience interjected spicy opinions.
Oh hey it's the Chonkasaurus guy!
https://wgntv.com/video/giant-snapping-turtle-nicknamed-chon...
Every page on this website ends with the How to make a herbarium pressing tutorial.
I crave for some photos of the author's herbarium.
I know nothing about Botany, but I must compliment a good website and writing style when I see one.
The article actually is about botany, but the title reminded me there is a whole area that could be called "criminal botany". As in, there are specific plants cultivated for illegal purposes. And on the other side, forensic botany (things like analysing pollen traces)
I enjoyed his rant videos about soul sucking landscaping and the ways it could be better with lower maintenance native plants.
Putting a seed into the ground then waiting a long time and hoping (praying?) that something will come out that you will like is a lot like ... training deep learning models. The latter will pay more of course :)
I loved botany and going outside before, but I loved it even more when he became popular(reference).
I haven't watched him for years because I don't want to miss any of the botany.
Instead of trying to make the plants healthy, make the dirt healthy. It seems like the same thing but it is a different mindset.
Joey is a gem
That's a great title & look for the website, I'm tired of generic looks we see everyday, something like this excites me as I remember the old web.
Wonderful podcast and shorts.
imagine a world with no plants, how sad it would be. i try to fill my house with as many plants i can, a constant cloning of plants, i have started collecting rocks. its m new daily habit. collect a few rocks. it makes my plants happy. and you know what, my plants like to be happy, if the plants are happy i am happy. are you happy ? there is a android application on github that identifys plants on device using local ai plant net or something www.github.com/jegly/box
all we want to know is how to grow our own mushrooms. I clicked with high hope.
Can I get this, but for geology?
I read through the site, but can’t find the crime pays part.
I just heard about a rare one in Wisconsin - someone I know knows someone that has land that includes original prairie and there is an almost extinct plant on that property. The local University has been studying the land for years, but a grad student stole seeds from this plant multiple years in a row and sold them - the landowner shut down access to the University, ending a 20 year study by a tenured prof.
I was gonna say botany will pay too
> It is my firm belief that any of the authors listed below (unless they’re dicks) would not want anyone to be prohibited from reading their work <links to book sharing websites follows>
The title is misleading. There was nothing in the article comparing/contrasting/linking botany and crime.
That is an S tier domain name/title
one of my favorite youtubers but I feel like if you're linking directly to a reading list the title of your post should reflect that
I'm aware of this guy but the presentation is a bit full on for me. My buddy who is in to botany says apparently his podcasts are really good: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zJDjluBz6qVCGrF1I8JhP
I listened to his book, Concrete Botany[1], while doing my gardening last month. I really enjoyed it even as a long time watcher of his YouTube channel. I don't know if I could have read it because it does seem to drag on a bit but it was worth it for his narration.
[1]: https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9798317900410-concrete-botany
Love this guy!!
My favorite Youtube channel.
Please watch the latest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDVcfSYcxc0. It's an interview with an old botanist, who shares his wisdom and philosophy, remains engaged after decades of witnessing first hand America's nature getting destroyed. 2 main points: - destroyed old-growth forests, grassland, remnant prairies takes millennia to be back to what they were, not decades. Insects and other pollinators don't just reappear - water availability for plants comes in many forms, all of which disappear with tillage.
Joey is an acquired taste, but if you look past the strong and odd personality (the persona?), his channel is a gold mine. But this time he was (rightfully) impressed by Gerry (Gerould) Wilhelm's wealth of knowledge.