Botany

The Botany program allows secondary and tertiary teachers to tailor a program to suit their students.

Our educational experts will design a program for your group’s needs based around the following modules:

Plant identification – Explore classification, major Australian families, herbarium specimens, microscope dissections and how to use keys.
Plant structures – Investigate seeds, leaves, stems and flowers with a microscope to understand the strategies plants use to grow and survive.
Horticulture – Find out how our horticulturalists manage the Gardens – from the pre-treatment of seeds to sowing, aftercare, transplanting and cuttings.
Photosynthesis – Learn the ins and outs of plant respiration and why we need plants to survive.

Resources

AC9S7U01: Investigate the role of classification in ordering and organising the diversity of life on Earth and use and develop classification tools including dichotomous keys.
AC9S7U02: Use models, including food webs, to represent matter and energy flow in ecosystems and predict the impact of changing abiotic and biotic factors on populations.

AC9S8U02: Analyse the relationship between structure and function of cells, tissues and organs in a plant and an animal organ system and explain how these systems enable survival of the individual.

AC9S9U02: Describe the form and function of reproductive cells and organs in animals and plants, and analyse how the processes of sexual and asexual reproduction enable survival of the species.
AC9S9U03: Represent the carbon cycle and examine how key processes including combustion, photosynthesis and respiration rely on interactions between Earth’s spheres (the geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere).

AC9S10U02: Use the theory of evolution by natural selection to explain past and present diversity and analyse the scientific evidence supporting the theory.

ACSBL015: Biodiversity includes the diversity of species and ecosystems; measures of biodiversity rely on classification and are used to make comparisons across spatial and temporal scales.
ACSBL016: Biological classification is hierarchical and based on different levels of similarity of physical features, methods of reproduction and molecular sequences.
ACSBL017: Biological classification systems reflect evolutionary relatedness between groups of organisms.
ACSBL019: Ecosystems are diverse, composed of varied habitats and can be described in terms of their component species, species interactions and the abiotic factors that make up the environment.
ACSBL041: Photosynthesis is one of the most important biological processes on Earth but it is quite inefficient; researchers report that natural trade-offs result in very low efficiency in many important food crops. Research is currently underway to engineer or enhance photosynthesis to improve food and fuel production. This includes the development of artificial leaves that convert solar energy to a liquid fuel via a process similar to photosynthesis, and investigation of combining more efficient algal photosynthesis with plant photosynthesis to improve crop productivity.
ACSBL052: Photosynthesis is a biochemical process that in plant cells occurs in the chloroplast and that uses light energy to synthesise organic compounds; the overall process can be represented as a balanced chemical equation.

ACSBL069: Darwin proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection to refute Lamarck’s theory. He provided evidence for descent with modification (branching evolution) based on patterns in variation of domesticated and wild species, and patterns of species distributions in time and space.
ACSBL120: All plants and animals have innate (general) immune responses to the presence of pathogens; vertebrates also have adaptive immune responses.
ACSBL009: Indigenous knowledge of environmental change and interactions between abiotic and biotic elements of ecosystems in local contexts has developed over thousands of years and provides valuable data for understanding ecosystem dynamics.