Talk:Phytolith

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Hyunsoo Lee. Peer reviewers: Sylerb, 65Eq.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 06:37, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Article Name

1) I don't know if this should be called "phytolith" or "phytoliths." Some-body who knows the standards should change it if appropriate.

Generally, articles are at the singular; I've moved it. - MPF 09:36, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

2) Phytoliths can be beautiful. I hope some-bdy can put some nice pics. onto here.

3) This is just off the top of my head. I hope some-body puts in some numbers and a better list of plants. There should also be some strictly botanical discussion. What's more, I only mention silicon phytoliths (since that's what interests us in archaeology).Kdammers 11:46, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

A very useful article start, thanks! - MPF 09:36, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

Numbers! I was wondering what size they tend to be. One micrograph seems to suggest a size of 100µm, ok. Can they be as big as 1mm? As small as ... I don't know. Can I see them with my amateur microscope? given the electron microscope scans, probably not. They often form rectangles?

That page from http://archaeobotany.dept.shef.ac.uk is pretty awesome, but so much detail! OsamaBinLogin (talk) 18:16, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

Discovered a long time ago

Someone want to provide something a bit more encyclopedic for that? Removed. skorpion 10:17, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

First / introductory paragraph poorly written

Hi-- someone needs to re-write the 1st paragraph to be more scholarly/encyclopedic. The 1st sentence is not good as an introduction. Thanks. SaturnCat (talk) 02:01, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Bacteria? Virus?

Thanks User:Sarah-Milgrim for all your hard work in April.

One thing I noticed, you wrote:

"Contrastingly, plants affected with bacterial wilt disease resulted in much larger phytoliths but they were abnormally shaped. This could be due to the virus causing constriction of the hypodermal cells, causing an influx of silica deposits.[6]"

Am I right in thinking that both these sentences are about plants affected with bacterial wilt disease? In the second sentence where it says "due to the virus causing" - should that not be "due to the bacteria causing"?

JohnGH (talk) 21:17, 13 June 2020 (UTC)

Hi JohnGH Yes, Thank you for catching that. It should be "due to the bacteria causing". If you have not already fixed it I will do that now. Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sarah-Milgrim (talk • contribs) 18:07, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

Standards

There are a phytolith organization and a set of standards; both should be incorporated: http://www.phytolithsociety.org/international-committee-on-.html and http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/96/2/253.full Jun 8, 2005 ... "Scope This paper presents the first International Code for Phytolith Nomenclature (ICPN), proposing an easy to follow, internationally accepted" Kdammers (talk) 13:05, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

Plan for contributing to this article

"At the moment, this is a draft written by a graduate student as an WikiEdu assignment, in a course about long-term environmental change. I am planning to keep adding contents, suggest possible improvements, and add references. Below are my plan for contributing to this article. If anyone can give me advice to my editing plan, such as relevance of the references, I would really appreciate it."

a) Add a section "Paleoenvironmental reconstructions".

At the moment, only few sentences (at Paleontology section) are written about the use of phytolith data for paleoenvironmental reconstructions.

b) Section "Archaeology"

Problems with phytolith analysis of remains - Add contents about the issue of over-/-under representation of certain plant types (Tsartsidou et al. 2007),

c) Section "Paleontology"

A sentence "Japanese and Korean archaeologists refer to grass and crop plant phytoliths as "plant opal" in archaeological literature." should be modified with more contents, and it is missing a reference, and should be moved to Archaeology section within the article.

d) Some sentences are emotional or subjective. For example, at the sentence "For extended examples of differentiating plants by their phytoliths, see the University of Sheffield's excellent Phytolith Interpretation page," the word 'excellent' can be replaced by "wide-ranging" or "comprehensive."

• Relevant sources to add (for adding/improving contents; for adding references to existing contents)

a) Deep-time paleoenvironmental reconstructions

Carter, J. (2002). "Phytolith analysis and paleoenvironmental reconstruction from Lake Poukawa Core, Hawkes Bay, New Zealand". Global and Planetary Change, 33(3), 257-267.

Conley, D. (2002). "Terrestrial ecosystems and the global biogeochemical silica cycle". Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 16(4), 68-1-68-8.

Miller, L., Smith, S., Sheldon, N., Stromberg, C., & Stroemberg, L. (2012). "Eocene vegetation and ecosystem fluctuations inferred from a high-resolution phytolith record". Geological Society Of America Bulletin, 124(9-10), 1577-1589.

Strömberg, C. (2004). "Using phytolith assemblages to reconstruct the origin and spread of grass-dominated habitats in the great plains of North America during the late Eocene to early Miocene". Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 207(3), 239-275.

b) Archaeological reconstructions; Human-plant interactions

Ashley, Barboni, Dominguez-Rodrigo, Bunn, Mabulla, Diez-Martin, Barba, and Baquedano (2010) "Paleoenvironmental and Paleoecological Reconstruction of a Freshwater Oasis in Savannah Grassland at FLK North, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania." Quaternary Research 74, no. 3: 333-43.

Tsartsidou, Lev-Yadun, Albert, Miller-Rosen, Efstratiou, & Weiner. (2007). "The phytolith archaeological record: Strengths and weaknesses evaluated based on a quantitative modern reference collection from Greece". Journal of Archaeological Science, 34(8), 1262-1275.

c) Discourses; Research directions; Phytolith C-14; Overall

Alexandre, Meunier, Lézine, Vincens, & Schwartz. (1997). "Phytoliths: Indicators of grassland dynamics during the late Holocene in intertropical Africa". Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 136(1), 213-229.

Hart, T. C. (2016). "Issues and directions in phytolith analysis". Journal of Archaeological Science, 68, 24–31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2016.03.001

Piperno, D. R. (2016). "Phytolith radiocarbon dating in archaeological and paleoecological research: a case study of phytoliths from modern Neotropical plants and a review of the previous dating evidence". Journal of Archaeological Science, 68, 54–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2015.06.002 Hyunsoo Lee (talk) 08:06, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

"phytoliths may help to alleviate the damaging effects of toxic heavy metals, such as aluminum"

Aluminium is not a heavy metal. But I don't know how to correct this (unsourced) statement. Jacques de Selliers (talk) 16:02, 30 July 2023 (UTC)