Celebrating Plants and People
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Cleansing With Fire May Invite Invasive Species
Fire is one of the best management tools that land managers have at their disposal so we can’t expect managers not to burn at all. Several rare native plant species thrive following controlled burning, which reduces dominant competitors. If we stop burning, those species may disappear. However, we need to be more cautious about when and where we use prescribed fire,
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Is This Evidence Of The Earliest Attempts At Agriculture?
This botanical find is really opening new windows to the past
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Plants That Trap Insects To Barter With Predatory Insects For Protection
The sticky plants aren’t all relatives. Rather, flypaper plants seem to have evolved more than 100 separate times. They may all make different gluey compounds. But whatever siren songs they’re sending out, bugs would be better off ignoring them.
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A Great Variety of Plant Species Depend on Large Animals For Seed Dispersal
If large animals become extinct in an ecosystem, it will not only be the largest-seed species that lose their potential dispersers; some of the smallest-seed species will also be at risk,
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Weaponizing A Native Fungus To Kill An Invasive Tree
What we are experiencing is the rapid expansion of the tree of heaven replacing our native species. This might be our shot at overcoming its expansion.
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Abandoning The Botanical Frontier: Where Are The Next Field Botanists?
Many botanists, however, believe that the era of the superstar collector is drawing to a close, at least in the 200-year-old form of a man (or occasionally woman) setting out from Europe or North America to see what the tropics hold. As botany has moved away from taxonomy and towards molecular studies, few of the jobs available allow researchers to spend long periods in the field gaining an encyclopaedic knowledge of plants. Tropical countries have also imposed restrictions on foreign researchers and are developing their own botanical expertise among home-grown scientists.
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The Herb That Smokes: Nicotine And Peppermint
Results show that all the peppermint plants contain minor amounts of nicotine before treatment, but the experiments revealed that the plants also incorporate nicotine considerably from the soil as well as from tobacco smoke. These findings demonstrate for the first time that the reported occurrence of nicotine indeed may originate from tobacco. The incorporated nicotine was subsequently metabolised by the plants.
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Physicists Conclude Destruction Of Earth’s Plants Puts Life On Earth At Risk
“You can think of the Earth like a battery that has been charged very slowly over billions of years. The sun’s energy is stored in plants and fossil fuels, but humans are draining energy much faster than it can be replenished.”
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How Does A Plant Colonize Islands That Lack Their Pollinator?
Our interest in taking a more extensive look at the role of wind for pollination of fadang rests in the fact that isolated islands that receive new seeds of the oceanic island cycad species would not have the native insect pollinators. As a result, the initial plants that colonize an isolated island would not be able to reproduce if they could not exploit some other means of pollination.
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Carnivorous Plant Using Acoustics Attracts Bats And Collects Their Droppings
The pitcher’s orifice features a prolonged concave structure, which we predicted to distinctively reflect the bats’ echolocation calls for a wide range of angles. This structure should facilitate the location and identification of pitchers even within highly cluttered surroundings. Pitchers lacking this structure should be less attractive for the bats.