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Category: Ecosystems

  • When Forests Pollute

    The commercial tree plantations don’t have young growth. At first, new trees and competing plants were cleared out, and the canopies of older trees make it less likely that new growth will come in. What these plantations have, then, is a build-up of nitrogen in the topsoil, which, when it rains, gets washed into local streams.

  • The Overlooked Last Refuge For Meadow Species

    Most of our farmland is now hostile to many of our wild plants and other wildlife due to the loss of wild flower meadows and the use of herbicides and fertilisers. The roadside verges are often the last refuge for wild flowers and the wildlife there depends on them.

  • How Do So Many Plant-Eating Animals Avoid Destroying The Savanna?

    Grevy’s zebra and plains zebra—two species that live in the same places and consume almost nothing but grass—eat varying amounts of different species of grass. To them, a grassland isn’t just one uniform banquet. It’s a patchwork landscape full of different foods, with some bits that appeal to one species and others that delight another. “The appropriate question is not, ‘Does it eat grass?’ but rather ‘Which grasses does it eat?’,”

  • The Tropical Flower That Supports Dozens Of Insect Species

    If just two flowers could play host to so many species of insect, just think about how many more are lurking on or in the other plants of the rainforest. How many are there, and how would we ever find them all?

  • Biodiversity: The Price We Pay For Demonizing Forest Fires

    The old sites differed environmentally because of the periodic nature of fire — some burned recently, some a little longer ago, some hadn’t for a long time. But with fire suppression, the canopy closed everywhere — leaving few differences from site to site. Overall, that supports less variety and fewer of the rare species that occupy pine barrens. As we found elsewhere in Wisconsin, our plant communities are becoming more homogeneous.

  • Have We Managed Our Forests At The Expense Of Pollinators?

    Two conservation goals of the early 20th century, extensive reforestation and reduced wildfire through fire exclusion, may have contributed to declining pollinator abundance as forests became denser and shrub covered

  • The Great Amazon Basin Is Home To Varied Plant Communities

    Looking at the lowland Amazon with this kind of detail, you can see back in time, from the way the topography was shaped millions of years ago, which still affects soils and mineral availability today, to the way that different species evolved to take advantage of this great variety of subtly changing conditions. And we can peer into the future and see how quickly human activity is changing the kaleidoscope of diversity that has been uniquely shaped over millions of years.

  • Why Eastern U.S. Forests So Resemble Asian Forests

    A new analysis of DNA studies shows that over half of all the trees and shrubs in the southern Appalachians can trace their ancestry to relatives a half a world away in Asia.

  • True Community: Trees Of Different Species Connected, Supporting Each Other

    This phenomenon amazes me. On the face of it, it appears as if the douglas-fir is acting altruistically (without expectation of return) to help neighbors of a completely different species in light of its own probable demise. Even without the altruism, that trees as widely unrelated as douglas-fir and ponderosa pine can transfer resources to each other for any reason through fungi from a completely different kingdom is a bit of a shocker to me.

  • Invasive Ants and Invasive Plants Damaging South African Plant Communities

    It is worrying that a number of large-seeded native plant species in invaded areas are not being dispersed at all. Even more concerning was that while removal of native seeds varied between invaded and non-invaded sites, there was no significant difference in removal of invasive seeds. This hints at a possible synergy between invasive ants and invasive plants, and the results paint a rather depressing picture for the seed fate of a number of native South African plant genera under Argentine ant rule.