A citizen science app for teaching botany

Rosanne Quinnell is a biochemist turned botanist. Her PhD explored a bacterium living in symbiotic association with soybean nodules. ‘It’s a bacterium that can fix atmospheric nitrogen to make it available in its biological form for plants,’ she explains. ‘That’s why people eat soybeans if they’re vegans … it’s accessible nitrogen for humans.’

Quinnell ­– an associate professor in the school of life and environmental sciences at the University of Sydney, Australia, and deputy director of the Sydney Environment Institute ­– thinks that her drift towards the botanical was influenced by her mother’s ‘absolute love of plants’.

‘I’ve converged from looking at the chemicals that make up organisms in a test tube towards ecosystems and the botanical world around them,’ she says. ‘I morphed from looking at tiny things to appreciating big things and big systems.’