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Celebrating Plants and People

  • The Most Unusual Plant You Never Heard Of Is Disappearing. And So Is Its Habitat.

    “They’re the canary in the coal mine, If they disappear, there is something wrong. And they have disappeared.” Not only the lake balls, but most of the algal mat at the foundation of the lake food web—all victims of the encroaching scum. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Surprising Victims Of Climate Change: Ghost Forests

    As seas continue to rise they seem certain to continue killing coastal forests, leaving only the specters of logs behind. In New Jersey, as elsewhere, that will mean less forestland — unless humans or nature find ways of fostering seedlings in fields currently used for farming. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Is The Solution To Antibiotic Resistance In Your Local Park?

    In southern Italy, Quave discovered that healers use elmleaf blackberry to treat boils and abscesses. She gathered a few bags of blackberry roots, sliced and dried the samples, vacuum-sealed them in plastic bags and shipped them back to her lab in Atlanta, where her colleagues ground them to a powder in a mill and extracted organic molecules using various solvents. When they added different combinations of blackberry molecules to brothy wells of MRSA — a particularly antibiotic-resistant species of Staphylococcus bacteria — the botanical extracts did not kill the microbes as typical antibiotics do. Rather, they prevented the bacteria from forming slimy, intractable mats called biofilms, which allow them to adhere to living tissues and medical devices like catheters in hospitals. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Might Selfies Save Forests?

    Social media can be used to explain why some protected lands get more use than others, the findings suggest. Analyzing photo locations, the researchers identified eight key factors that drive the use of conserved lands, including forest cover, trail density, and opportunities for snow sports. These factors can inform investment decisions, researchers say. (Click on title for full story.)

  • How Did African Forests Become Savannas? The Acacias Blame The Antelope

    A study that includes a group of South African scientists has found that the arrival of browsing medium sized antelopes was probably what turned Africa’s ancient forests into the open savannas. (Click on title for full story.)

  • That Dandelion May Be A Unique Microspecies

    So when pulling out dandelions, think … you don’t have to head into impenetrable jungle to discover potentially new species. You may find one while doing the weeding. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Chocolate Threatened. Mangoes To The Rescue?

    Wild mango butter has a higher moisture content than cocoa butter, and a growing body of evidence shows that higher moisture content butters produce low fat chocolate which may help prevent obesity, heart diseases and diabetes . The news will please the chocolate industry as demand for cocoa is predicted to rise by 30% by 2020, especially from the cosmetic, food and pharmaceutical industries. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Foodie Mushroom Greed Threatening Forests

    “They can be completely indiscriminate,They rip up everything and then, later on, discard what they don’t want. But that often means destroying quite fragile rare but inedible fungi for no good reason at all. At the same time, these fungi are often very beautiful to look at and are a real attraction for the visitors to the forest at this time of year. That is one reason why we have introduced our ban. (Click on title for full story)

  • How Millennia Of Human Habitation Left An Ecosystem Healthier Than Before

    Human occupation is usually associated with degraded landscapes but 13,000 years of repeated occupation by British Columbia’s coastal First Nations has had the opposite effect, enhancing temperate rainforest productivity. )Click on title for full story)

  • Taking Guesswork Out Of Using Native Plants In Highway Verge Plantings And Maintenance

    There’s no question that regional vegetation is a better ecological choice, but now it can also be a better economical one (Click on title for full story)