Plants in Action
Plants in Action Adaptation in Nature — Performance in Cultivation edited by Brian Atwell, Paul Kriedemann & Colin Turnbull
In September 2010, the first edition of Plants in Action will be republished as an electronic book on the server of the University of Queensland. It will be open access and downloads will be free. This new stage of the Plants in Action project is made possible by generous sponsorship of the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). The next stage will be the complete revision of the book, with an expected completion date of September 2011.
Textbook
Plants in Action is a lavishly illustrated textbook, written and edited by members of the Australian and New Zealand Societies of Plant Physiologists and Horticulture Societies. This textbook was published in 1999 by Macmillan Education Australia Pty Ltd, and won the Australian Publishers Award for the best tertiary textbook for 1999 in competition with all other tertiary texts published in Australia that year. The judges were especially complimentary about subject coverage, high quality illustrations, and a clarity of prose conducive to easy reading.
Plants in Action explores basic principles underlying plant biology in natural and managed communities throughout Australasia. By providing up-to-date and useful perspectives on plant science, this book will appeal immediately to upper level undergraduates in Universities and tertiary Institutes of Technology where plant physiology forms part of their degree coursework in Agriculture, Horticulture, Forestry and Environmental Sciences. Postgraduate students as well as professional plant scientists will also find much useful source material in this textbook because the narrative is built on credible experiments and richly illustrated with original data. Numerous vignettes provide a human background to new knowledge that is readily transparent and structured for easy 'grazing'.
In both name and actuality, Plants in Action embodies practical applications of plant science in nature and global commerce. World markets are already crowded with high quality texts on plant physiology. Basic principles are thus well covered, but neither application of principles, nor acknowledgment of Australasian contributions to plant science is well covered in texts from the northern hemisphere. Where practical, but without jingoism, Australasian examples and case studies are used to illustrate original science as well as practical applications of that science; hence the subtitle: Adaptation in Nature, and Performance in Cultivation.