Botany Ambassador Program

Share Botanical Discoveries in Madroño

Would you like to help communicate to a broad readership the botanical discoveries reported in Madroño?

The California Botanical Society invites our Botany Ambassadors to write brief but informative summaries of Madroño articles published within the previous year.  These summaries will be posted on the Society’s website, displayed on our Facebook page, and published in our digital newsletter, Nemophila. In addition to being a great resumé-builder, your “translation” of a Madroño article will help increase the profile of the Society and our journal, while also spreading the word about the exciting discoveries of professional botanists, geographers, plant ecologists, and evolutionary biologists conducting research in the western U.S.  If you’d like to volunteer to write a summary for a general audience, please follow the following guidelines:

• • Please write to membership@calbotsoc.org with a request to write a summary, indicating the author and title of the article as well as the Madroño issue in which it appeared. You will be notified as to whether your selected article is available or has been assigned to another volunteer.

• • The summary should be 250-500 words long and include synopses of: the motivation for the study, the focal questions it addresses, the methods used, the most important results, an overview of the study’s implications, and avenues for future research.

• • The summary should include a significance statement that expresses – in your view – why the paper is interesting, surprising, and/or noteworthy.

• • You may include open access photographs or images from the paper (e.g., figures that tell a clear story).

• • Please use non-technical language that is accessible to a general non-professional audience.  Technical botanical terms should be defined when used.

• • Provide an eye-catching title of your summary that draws attention to the nature of the research that you’re summarizing.
  • Please note that your summary may be edited for accuracy and clarity (or brevity!) by our Council members prior to being posted.

Review Madroño Manuscripts

The Society invites graduate student and postdoc members of the Society to hone their critical skills as reviewers of Madroño manuscripts. Ambassadors will be working with Justen Whittall, the Madroño Editor, and will learn from the reviews provided by other reviewers as well as from the Editor’s final decision. If you wish to participate as a reviewer, please fill out this form: