Natural Resource Technology

This text is a re-structuring the “classical” introductory botany course into a more logical sequence of themes with two main ideas: (1) put as much plant-related information as possible into an evolutionary context and (2) explain complicated problems with simple words and metaphors. One extremely important concept to understand: plants are not animals! Obviously, this phrase has many important meanings. First of all, since we humans are animals, it is much easier for us to understand animal life than plant life. Many terms that are associated with animal life (like “stomach” or “blood pressure”) are generally well known, even intuitively. Learning botany as a beginner requires to speak about plants, and to speak, you have to learn botanical language. This is why you need to know a vast amount of terms, so be prepared to work hard.

As a course, botany is the study of plants and many of the other non-animal groups in the tree of life. With regard to organisms, this course begins with the Cyanobacteria, winds through several groups of unrelated organisms that were all once categorized as fungi, picks apart pieces of the "protista," and finally emerges into Kingdom Plantae. With regard to scientific disciplines, we begin with ecology, transition to a bit of chemistry and cell biology, assemble these building blocks to learn anatomy and physiology, use these characteristics to discuss evolution and systematics, classify our organisms into related groups based on organismal biology, then discover their interrelatedness by returning back to ecology--all with a sprinkle of physical geography to give us some historical context.

This book was created to support teaching of an introductory unit on plant environmental physiology at Charles Darwin University. It makes use of various images of cells and tissues to introduce and illustrate the range of plant organelles, cells, tissues and organs.

In this book, straightforward descriptions and plentiful images will help you discover the plant science essentials including plant structures and functions, classification, flowers, fruits, and seeds. From there, you’ll explore requirements for plant growth such as light, water, soil, and nutrients. Finally, you’ll delve into plant genetics and reproductive processes, and discover how people harness natural processes to propagate plants and breed new varieties.