Here are the promised notes on the seven plant families we're learning to recognize.

Asteraceae (formerly Compositae): the composites. Dandelions, chicory, asters, sunflowers, goldenrod, chrysanthemums, coneflowers, various daisies, and lettuce are all in this family. This is a cosmopolitan family, found worldwide both in temperate and tropical areas. These plants make a unique inflorescence type called a head (picture a daisy) where what looks like one flower is really made up many smaller, bilaterally symmetric (the "petals" or rays) and radially symmetric (in the disc) flowers. Our species are mostly summer and fall blooming, but a few show off in the spring, including:
Packera (Groundsel)
Erigeron (Fleabane daisy)
Taraxacum officinale (Dandelion): Europe.

Brassicaceae (formerly Cruciferae): the crucifers. Cabbage, mustard, turnips, radishes, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, and brussel sprouts all belong to this family. These dicots contain strong smelling mustard oils to help repel herbivores. The odd combination of four petals and six stamens in the flowers makes them easy to recognize in bloom. The four-petaled, cross-shaped flowers gave the family its old name, the Cruciferae (like cross or crucifix). This family prefers the temperate zones and is most diverse in Europe, temperate Asia, and North America. Most of ours are spring bloomers, with white, yellow, or occasionally purple flowers. Common examples include:
Alliaria petiolata (Garlic mustard): Invasive. Europe.
Cardamine (Toothworts): Includes native spring-ephemerals.
Brassica nigra (Black mustard): Europe.

Fabaceae (formerly Leguminosae): the legumes. This is a large, cosmopolitan family, including peas, beans, lentils, clover, vetch, alfalfa, sensitive plants, locust trees, mimosas, redbuds, and the Kentucky coffeetree, to name just a few. Most of them have a mutualistic relationship with Rhizobium bacteria, which live in their root nodules and fix nitrogen. They often have compound leaves. The bilaterally-symmetric flowers (loved by bees) have five petals, 10 stamens, and one superior carpel (leading to the typical bean-like, or "legume" fruit). Most of ours are summer to fall bloomers, but redbud is one of our most obvious flowering trees in the spring:
Cercis canadensis (redbud)
Trifolium (Clover)
Coronilla/Securigera varia (Crown vetch): Mediterranean.

Lamiaceae (formerly Labitae): the mint family. Peppermint, spearmint, chia, bee-balm, henbit, ground ivy, and salvia are all members of this large and cosmopolitan family. The opposite, simple leaves, square stems, and aromatic foliage (volatile oils) make this an easy family to recognize. The bilaterally symmetric flowers (loved by bees) have five fused sepals, five fused petals, four stamens, and two carpels. You'll see them blooming spring to fall, mostly because some of our most common lawn-weeds bloom almost continually:
Lamium (Henbit): Eurasia.
Ajuga reptans (Carpet bugleweed): Eurasia.
Glechoma hederacea (Ground ivy): Europe.
Monarda (Bee balm): Several natives. Mostly summer blooming.

Poaceae (formerly Graminae): the grasses (you'll hear "graminoid" for grass-like, too). A huge, cosmopolitan family of wind-pollinated monocots. Major food source for humans (and pandas!), including rice, wheat, oats, corn, and barley, but also bamboo, our native cane (Arundinaria), and Kentucky bluegrass (which isn't native to Kentucky). Parallel-veined leaves in two ranks along round or oval stems.
Poa praetensis (Bluegrass): Europe & NE US.
Arundinaria gigantea (Cane)
Zea mays (Corn)

Ranunculaceae: the buttercup family. This family is most diverse in the temperate zones (cooler climates). It includes buttercups (Ranunculus), clematis vines, columbine, Delphinium, and hellebores, among others. Most of ours are bee-pollinated. The flowers often have primitive floral traits (radial symmetry, many parts, parts free/unfused, superior ovary), though Delphinium is bilaterally symmetric, and both it and columbine have nectar spurs. Helleborus also has interesting nectaries in the flowers. Most of ours are spring blooming, though we have a couple of clematis that are fall bloomers:
Ficaria verna (Lesser celandine): Invasive. Europe.
Ranunculus (Buttercup): Native and introduced species.
Thalictrum (Meadow rue): Includes spring-ephemerals.
Clematis: Native, invasive, and cultivated species here.
Delphinium: Includes a spring-ephemeral.

Rosaceae: the rose family. This is a cosmopolitan family with some preference for cooler climates (so, not common in the tropical rainforest). We rely on this family for fruit (blackberries, strawberries, apples, peaches, pears, plums, cherries, apricots, nectarines), almonds, and flowers (roses, crabapple trees, hawthorns). We also have invasive species here, like Japanese multiflora rose and callery pear. The flowers have an unseal floral cup structure (hypanthium) at the base, which the flower parts connect around. The radially symmetric flowers have a hypanthium and five sepals, five petals, many stamens, 1 to 5 superior carpels. This flower setup is easy to recognize with a little practice, as it doesn't vary much across our species (unless you encounter a double-double domesticated flower). Apples and their relatives make a unique fruiting structure called a pome, which is a fleshy hypanthium expanded around a papery core (the core of an apple is its carpels, so botanically-speaking, that's actually the fruit). Many of our spring-blooming trees belong to this family, as well as smaller, summer-blooming herbs.

Rosa (Roses): Native species & an invasive from Asia.
Potentilla indica (Mock strawberry): Asia.
Malus (Apples & crabapples)
Rubus (Blackberries & raspberries)

Our first iNaturalist assignment has two goals: to get everyone to explore the iNaturalist site a little more, and for you to find some good examples of fungi and lichens to help us practice recognizing these organisms.

Browse through iNaturalist's fungi and lichen observations, find the following (see below), and add them to our Bio 313 project. Adding someone else's observation to a project is easy. Open the observation, go to the right side of the screen, see "Projects" and click the drop-down in the search field (it says "Add to a Project"). You should see Bio 313L listed when you click. Select it and you're good to go. (Occasionally, you'll get a listing where the observer has asked that this not be allowed. In that case, you'll have to find a different observation to use.)

What you are looking for:

The coolest photo observation of a basidiomycete fungus that you can find.
The coolest photo observation of an ascomycete fungus that you can find.
The coolest photo observation of a crustose lichen that you can find.
The coolest photo observation of a foliose lichen that you can find.
The coolest photo observation of a fruticose lichen that you can find.

Note that iNaturalist puts the lichens under the type of fungus involved in the mutualism, but don't choose lichens as your ascomycete and basidiomycete examples.

After adding your choices to our Bio 313 iNaturalist site, submit a list to Canvas of which species you chose, what group each one is an example of, and which iNaturalist user made the original observation. First come, first serve, so if someone has already added a species to our site, you can't add another example of the same one.

Happy hunting!

Several of us saw lovely, large, s-curved diatoms in our Loch Norse water samples. These belong to the genus Gyrosigma, and are nice examples of pennate diatioms.

The handsome diatom pictured below is one of our own Loch Norse specimens.

The genus Gyrosigma (gyro = round and sigma = curved) belongs to the family Naviculaceae, which includes lots of species that we might see in our local ponds and rivers. Gyrosigma species are often found crawling along the surfaces of mud or sand, so ours may have come off some of the rocks along the bottom of Loch Norse. You can learn more about these diatoms and their relatives, and see more examples of pennate diatoms, at iNaturalists' Naviculaceae page.

Welcome to our General Botany iNaturalist project! This site should serve as a great place for us to share observations of neat plants that we see and to learn more about diversity of plants and plant-like organisms.

On the topic of plant-like organisms, the mysterious strings of tiny, greenish cells that everyone saw in their Loch Norse water samples today turned out to be cyanobacteria. Dr. Cooper thinks they are in the genus Dolichospermum. The cells looked splotchy not because they have organelles like chloroplasts (they're prokaryotic, so they don't) but because they have aerotopes (little gas-filled areas) to help them float. After all, if you need to photosynthesize, it helps to be near the surface of the water where there's lots of sun. You can also see the occasional round, clear cell mixed in to the strand. Like we saw in our Nostoc samples, these are heterocysts, where the colony fixes nitrogen.

I took photos and posted the observation to our project, so it's there for reference. Don't forget, there are lots of iNaturalist projects that include neat photos of pond water organisms. Explore a little and try searching on terms like "algae", "pond water", or "diatoms".