Alan Paton | Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (original) (raw)

Papers by Alan Paton

Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, Oct 17, 2018

Phytochemistry, Nov 1, 1996

Biochemical Systematics and Ecology, Apr 1, 2002

Scientific Data

The Checklist of the Vascular Plants of the Republic of Guinea (CVPRG) is a specimen-based, exper... more The Checklist of the Vascular Plants of the Republic of Guinea (CVPRG) is a specimen-based, expert-validated knowledge product, which provides a concise synthesis and overview of current knowledge on 3901 vascular plant species documented from Guinea (Conakry), West Africa, including their accepted names and synonyms, as well as their distribution and status within Guinea (indigenous or introduced, endemic or not). The CVPRG is generated automatically from the Guinea Collections Database and the Guinea Names Backbone Database, both developed and maintained at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in collaboration with the staff of the National Herbarium of Guinea. A total of 3505 indigenous vascular plant species are reported of which 3328 are flowering plants (angiosperms); this represents a 26% increase in known indigenous angiosperms since the last floristic overview. Intended as a reference for scientists documenting the diversity and distribution of the Guinea flora, the CVPRG will a...

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2021

The access to molecular collections worldwide greatly improves the quality of scientific research... more The access to molecular collections worldwide greatly improves the quality of scientific research by making a growing number of data available for investigation. The efforts on digitization also aim at facilitating the exchange of material between institutions and researchers that must follow regulations in place and respect best practice. The handbook presented here proposes a workflow to follow to safely exchange materials, in accordance with international laws and legislations. We make numerous recommendations here to help the institutions and researchers to navigate the legal and administrative procedures, to manage molecular collections in the best way possible.

Herbarium collections shape our understanding of the world’s flora and are crucial for addressing... more Herbarium collections shape our understanding of the world’s flora and are crucial for addressing global change and biodiversity conservation. The formation of such natural history collections, however, are not free from sociopolitical issues of immediate relevance. Despite increasing efforts addressing issues of representation and colonialism in natural history collections, herbaria have received comparatively less attention. While it has been noted that the majority of plant specimens are housed in the global North, the extent of this disparity has not been rigorously quantified to date. Here, by analyzing over 85 million specimen records and surveying herbaria across the globe, we assess the colonial legacy of botanical collections and how we may move towards a more inclusive future. We demonstrate that colonial exploitation has contributed to an inverse relationship between where plant biodiversity exists in nature and where it is housed in herbaria. Such disparities persist in ...

TAXON, 2020

It is time to synthesize the knowledge that has been generated through more than 260 years of bot... more It is time to synthesize the knowledge that has been generated through more than 260 years of botanical exploration, taxonomic and, more recently, phylogenetic research throughout the world. The adoption of an updated Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) in 2011 provided the essential impetus for the development of the World Flora Online (WFO) project. The project represents an international, coordinated effort by the botanical community to achieve GSPC Target 1, an electronic Flora of all plants. It will be a first‐ever unique and authoritative global source of information on the world's plant diversity, compiled, curated, moderated and updated by an expert and specialist‐based community (Taxonomic Expert Networks – “TENs” – covering a taxonomic group such as family or order) and actively managed by those who have compiled and contributed the data it includes. Full credit and acknowledgement will be given to the original sources, allowing users to refer back to the pri...

Scientific Reports, 2020

The current study focuses on yield and nutritional quality changes of wheat grain over the last 1... more The current study focuses on yield and nutritional quality changes of wheat grain over the last 166 years. It is based on wheat grain quality analyses carried out on samples collected between 1850 and 2016. Samples were obtained from the Broadbalk Continuous Wheat Experiment (UK) and from herbaria from 16 different countries around the world. Our study showed that, together with an increase in carbohydrate content, an impoverishment of mineral composition and protein content occurred. The imbalance in carbohydrate/protein content was specially marked after the 1960’s, coinciding with strong increases in ambient [CO2] and temperature and the introduction of progressively shorter straw varieties. The implications of altered crop physiology are discussed.

Thai Forest Bulletin (Botany), 2016

The vision of the pro-iBiosphere project is to prepare for an integrative system for intelligent ... more The vision of the pro-iBiosphere project is to prepare for an integrative system for intelligent management of biodiversity knowledge, i.e. an Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System. The envisaged infrastructure is intended to: (i) offer a robust service oriented infrastructure suited to the discovery and re-use of taxon-level information distributed at numerous locations accessible to the internet and that will include a central registry of services for their discovery and documentation; (ii) provide open and free access to all names and taxonomic information via a small number of portals to all persons who have a requirement for biodiversity data, without depending on consent of other individuals or institutions; and (iii) facilitate the re-use of biodiversity data and information for legitimate purposes. Progress towards these goals is hampered by numerous factual, technical, economic, sociological, legal. and other factors. Legal factors include potential and actual legal...

Check List

Angola is a tropical country with many biogeographical units and, therefore, has a high floristic... more Angola is a tropical country with many biogeographical units and, therefore, has a high floristic diversity. Although an increasing number of floristic studies has been carried out in Angola in recent years, the country is still considered to be underinvestigated as many species being collected were previously unknown there. Several scientific groups working in different parts of Angola contributed to this paper their data from biodiversity assessments. With this we can add 67 species newly recorded for Angola, including two new generic records and five alien species, to the almost 7,300 vascular plant taxa known so far for Angola. Most of the new records for Angola are also present in different neighbouring countries, but they are little known, and their IUCN threat status has not been assessed yet. However, ongoing fieldwork and exploration are needed to complete the floristic knowledge of the understudied country.

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), 2016

A new species of Orthosiphon (Lamiaceae), O. cinereus A.J.Paton, sp. nov. from Angola is describe... more A new species of Orthosiphon (Lamiaceae), O. cinereus A.J.Paton, sp. nov. from Angola is described and the eight species of Orthosiphon in Angola listed with reference to previous accounts. Orthosiphon newtonii Briq. is reduced to the synonymy of Endostemon tubulascens (Briq.) M.Ashby.