Celebrating Plants and People
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When Hornbills In Asia Are Disturbed Forests Disappear
Hornbills are facing extinction in many places and the loss of hornbills would have cascading negative effects on the seed dispersal of plants dependent on them in future.
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Orchid Pollination Partnership So Rare It May Be Doomed To Fail
The problem is so bad that the orchids are reproducing at significantly lower rates than other Caladenia species. As the researchers wrote in their paper, “Populations are likely to now persist primarily through individual plant longevity rather than reproduction.”
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As Climate Change Threatens Flowers, Their Pollinators Abandon Them
The pattern seen here may predict future effects of climate change in other systems, the authors say. Their results highlight how climate change can decouple well-established mutualisms between bees and plants.
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How Syrian War Threatens Seed Bank And So, Our Future
Among those fleeing are Aleppo’s scientists. Until recently, the city was home to ICARDA, a seed bank, one of many in a system that spans the globe. These seed banks collect and store hundreds of thousands of seed varieties, encompassing nearly every plant ever cultivated by humans, going back to the dawn of agriculture. Someday, we may need these seeds. Nature is always changing. We don’t know what will grow next year, and what won’t. Seed banks constitute humanity’s agricultural memory.
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Saving Ecosystems Saves Communities
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aim to eradicate extreme poverty and, in Goal 15, “Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.”
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Drought And Fire May Permanently Change Western Forest Landscapes
The result is bad news for forests here, in the West and around the world. A planet with fewer trees is less able to fight climate change, because trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as part of photosynthesis. “The future in a lot of places is looking shrubbier.”
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In Orchid Pollinator Deception, Size May Not Matter But Shape Certainly Does
Thus, despite the critical and long-distance role of chemical cues in securing pollinator behaviour, we offer a new and compelling case for the importance of floral morphology in sexual deception.
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How Deforestation, Desertification, and Climate Change Spur Migration
Increased land degradation is also one of the factors that can lead to migration and it is being exacerbated by climate change
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Carnivorous Plants: Astounding Scientists For Centuries
As a bounty of new research reveals, biologists are still sticking up for carnivorous plants, and still unearthing surprising details about the anatomy, evolution, biochemistry and hunting tactics
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Carnivorous Lizards Turn Into Vegetarians In Real Time
Insect scarcity in the Greek archipelago is causing lizards there to rely more heavily on eating plants and that this, in turn, is causing natural selection to favour anatomical traits that support herbivory. The lizards still interbreed and are thus one species. It seems unlikely that will remain the case for very long.