1. The Importance of Plants

2. Why are plants important?
Harvesting the sun’s energy
The world’s lungs
Biodiversity
Food
Pharmaceuticals
Building material
Flood & erosion control
Recreation and ecotourism
Intrinsic value

3. Harvesting the sun’s energy
Plants = Autotrophs
Every food web starts with the sun and primary producers

4. The world’s lungs
Through photosynthesis plants take in carbon dioxide and produce oxygen
Carbon dioxide + water + solar energy  glucose + oxygen

5. Biodiversity What a tangled web we weave.
Every organisms is dependent on other organisms.
Growing crops: we remove plants from their natural habitats.
Building roads and rail ways removes plants
Cutting down plants to use them for our own purposes
Decreasing biodiversity = less adaptable when the environment changes!

6. Food

7. Pharmaceuticals
Foxglove – digitalis = a drug used to treat heart disease
Periwinkle
vincristine = used to treat childhood leukemia
vinblastine = used to treat Hodgkin’s disease
Cannabis Plant – tetrahydrocannabionol (THC) = used to increase appetite, reduce nausea and may reduce muscle spasms

8. Building material Wood Thatched roofs made from palm trees
Wood for musical instruments

9. Flood & erosion control
Root systems keep soil in place
Hurricane Katrina – wet land loss and erosion a big factor
~1950s -canals built through the marsh for petroleum exploration and ship traffic. These new ditches sliced the wetlands into a giant jigsaw puzzle, increasing erosion and allowing lethal doses of salt water to infiltrate freshwater marshes

10. Recreation and ecotourism

11. BIG Business Canola crop worth $2.5 billion
Wheat crop worth $1.8 billion
Corn crop worth $753 million

12. Intrinsic value
It is the ethical or philosophic value that an object has "in itself" or "for its own sake", as an intrinsic property.
An object with intrinsic value may be regarded as an end or end-in-itself.

13. Some cool plants
Pitcher plants – carnivorous

14. Some cool plants Venus Flytrap - carnivorous
natively only in North and South Carolina in the United States

15. Some cool plants Rafflesia arnoldii 3 meter wide flower
strong odour of decaying flesh – “corpse flower”
Indonesia

16. Some cool plants
Stinking Titan Arum
Indonesia

17. Some cool plants Romanesco Broccoli
The design is similar to a fractal which is a complicated design produced by simple mathematic rules.

18. Some cool plants
The boabab tree

19. Growing new limbs! Meristemic tissue ~ stem cells
Located in specific regions to regenerate new parts

20. Biofuels
a wide range of fuels which are in some way derived from biomass
1.8% of the world's transport fuel in 2008
Debate over lack of soil to grow food crops & potential increase in the cost of food