Will you be attending the Botany 2018 conference in Minnesota later this month? If so be sure to attend the Plenary Lecture by our own IAPT member Walter Judd: “Flora of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth” based on their recently published book of the same title. Sunday 22 July, 7:30 PM. We all know about Walt’s work on melastomes and ericads, but who knew about his work on the flora of Middle Earth? And why did he not invite any of us along for the field work? Photograph of Walt in Jamaica holding a specimen of Miconia angustiflora (Benth.) Naudin by Gretchen Ionta. And the cover of their new book.
Congratulations to several Australian governments for announcing new investments in Australian herbaria: The Australian Government in its budget released last month announced an initial allocation of $40M towards construction of a new building in Canberra to house four National Research Collections, including the Australian National Herbarium (CANB), the Australian National Wildlife Collection and the Australian National Insect Collection. While this allocation is not yet enough for the proposed building, it's a good initial allocation. The New South Wales Government has committed $60 million towards a project to build a new, state-of-the-art facility at the Mount Annan Botanic Gardens in We
Web of Science's InCites has released its annual Journal Citations Report, with Journal Impact Factors for all Web of Science journals. The JIF for Taxon, the journal of the IAPT, has increased, from 2.447 in 2016 to 2.680 in 2017. Journal Impact Factors are an indication of the average number of citations of published papers, and are used by many universities and some funding agencies to rank the quality and reach of research. Taxon ranks at 53 out of 222 journals in the Plant Sciences category of Journal Citation Reports. The 5-year-average JIF is holding steady at just under 3. Congratulations to Dirk Albach, Editor-in-Chief of Taxon, the Taxon editorial team, the IAPT Publications Commit
