Editorials

The great physicist Niels Bohr is reported to have said that “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”, but that should not stop us trying to guess what 2026 might bring.

December is a time when ‘… of the Year’ pieces appear in all kinds of publications. For this year only, Nature Plants is joining the trend.

The jack-o’-lantern, the carved pumpkin with the evil grin, has become the emblem of Halloween. This lantern has its historic roots in carved turnips, which have been used in folklore for hundreds of years.

All over the world, farmers are finding new ways to adapt to climate change. But these innovations risk severing connections to the land that have been shaped over millennia.

Intercropping is an agricultural practice that can enhance soil quality, total yield and biodiversity. Modern advances in artificial intelligence and robotics are helping this traditional approach to overcome some of its practical challenges.

Scientists are often accused of ignoring the aesthetics of the world in favour of prosaic utilitarianism. Nothing could be less true, as the covers of this journal and others constantly prove.

Plant science is, as yet, conducted not by large language models or artificial intelligence, but by people. From this month, Nature Plants will be publishing pieces specifically focused on the personal side of research and researchers.

We can now carry in our pockets applications that accurately identify the plants around us. These are interesting tools for researchers, but they also help everyone to appreciate the diversity of the natural world.

Field trials are indispensable for the application of agronomic genes. However, whether a scientific publication needs to include data on field trials is a very complicated issue.

The new US administration has been very quick to enact their agenda in the first quarter of 2025. This has generated some changes that affect support for plant research and agricultural security.

Reduced wood density in natural forests might be an underappreciated risk of climate change. It could promote susceptibility to biotic and abiotic damage by pests, drought or wildfire.

Science is often characterized as advancing through the discovery of rare and improbable events. For almost 200 years the Galápagos islands have supplied many such ‘black swans’, both zoological and botanical.

Climate change and anthropogenic disturbance are accelerating the need for more radical ecological interventions to protect Earth’s dwindling biodiversity. But these conservation measures can be controversial and the human fingerprints they leave behind challenge our perceptions of what ‘natural’ really means in the Anthropocene.

December is traditionally a time for looking back at the year that has passed. For plant biology, drought has been a frequently raised topic in 2024 — and 2025 is unlikely to be any different.

The functions of many genes in model plants are unknown. Traditional methods to infer function are showing their limitations, but other approaches are emerging.

With an increasing ability to understand the complexity of living systems, it becomes more and more evident that well-defined canonical functions of proteins and complexes are intertwined.

The language of science preserves reminders of its chequered history, sometimes resulting in unintended consequences and offence.

Botanically inclined scientists are well acquainted with ‘plant blindness’, the common tendency to overlook flora and concentrate on fauna. But we are similarly afflicted by aesthetic opinions with serious consequences for conservation.

The variety of species and systems available to scientists fascinated by plants is remarkably rich and deserves to be celebrated.

Technological advances have demonstrated the possibility of chemical synthesis of a multicellular plant genome. What does this mean for humans and how should we prepare for this breakthrough?