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Celebrating Plants and People

  • If Seeing Trees Reduces Stress, Does Seeing More Trees Reduce Stress More?

    The results were overwhelmingly positive, even when accounting for any errors incurred by self-assessment. After crunching the numbers, the research team found that “at the lowest level of tree density [2%], 41% of participants reported a calming effect. As tree cover density reached 36%, more than 90% of participants reported a stress recovery experience.” That means that the greater the amount of trees, the greater the amount of stress will be reduced. That result confirms all previous research indicating that the more trees people see, the greater their experience of stress reduction is. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Did Rise Of Flowering Plants Kill The Dinosaurs?

    Our research follows other recent findings that dinosaur diversity was already decreasing before the extinction event, exactly as mammals were on the rise. So what caused this growing change in the prehistoric animal kingdom? One explanation is that the rapid spread of flowering plants (angiosperms) during the late Cretaceous period had a significant effect on the ecology of animal groups. (Click on title for full story.)

  • There Is No Pristine Wilderness. It’s Been Gone For Millennia

    These findings suggest that we need to move away from a conservation paradigm of protecting the earth from change to a design paradigm of positively and proactively shaping the types of changes that are taking place. This sounds scary, and it sounds very self-serving. But the reality is that there are 7 billion people living on an already heavily altered planet. It is a pipe dream to think that we can go back to some sort of pristine past. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Warming Climate Reduces Floral Scent, Leaving Pollinators Clueless

    Increases in temperature associated with the changing global climate are interfering with plant-pollinator mutualism, an interaction facilitated mainly by floral color and scent. (Click on title for full story).

  • The Highly Flexible Moss That Collects Even The Scarcest Water

    The key to the plant’s success is its small leaf hair point, or awn. These 0.5-2 mm-long hair-like structures at the tip of each leaf function like a Swiss Army knife in their ability to collect water from a variety of size scales. Whether the plant gets buckets of rain or only the occasional passing fog, the awn of S. caninervis can exploit any available water resource using four specialized tools. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Another Pollinator Problem: Streetlights Disrupt Moth Pollination

    Where there are street lights, our research indicates that the moths are being attracted upwards, away from the fields and hedgerows. This is likely to cause disruption of night-time pollination by moths, which could be serious for the flowers which rely upon moths for pollination, and of course there could be negative effects on the moths themselves as well. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Predicting Urban Tree Health From Impervious Surface Cover

    The impervious surface threshold can be used to identify planting sites where red maples will thrive. Trees surrounded by < 33% impervious surface cover (at 25 m) will most likely be in good or excellent condition. Trees surrounded by 33% - 66% are likely to be in fair condition. Trees surrounded by 67% or more tend to be in poor condition. Landscape architects, urban planners, arborists, landscapers, and other tree care professionals can use these impervious surface thresholds to reduce red maple management and replacement costs.. Arborists rate tree condition as poor, fair, good, or excellent. Impervious surface cover can be measured from satellite images with software such as ArcGIS or by using the Pace to Plant technique described. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Plants Respond To Touch And Even A Shadow

    Although people generally assume plants don’t feel when they are being touched, this shows that they are actually very sensitive to it and can redirect gene expression, defence and potentially their metabolism because of it. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Secret Glue Ivy Uses To Climb Could Save Our Lives

    More than 130 years ago, Charles Darwin discovered that ivy’s sticking power is thanks to a thin yellow glue secreted from its roots. But since then, little has been known about how the adhesive works. (Click on title for full story.)

  • A Polluted City Gathers No Moss: New Use Of A Bioindicator

    More broadly, their study is the first to generate a rigorous and detailed map of air pollution in a U.S. city using moss and may ultimately lead to dramatic improvements in air-quality monitoring across the country. The study showed that moss can serve as a low-cost screening tool to help cities strategically place their expensive and limited instrumental air-quality monitors. (Click on title for full story.)