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Category: Plants & People

  • Looking For Ocean Plastic Pollution? Check The Mangrove Forests

    This part of the island is uninhabited, yet the area is full of rubbish, and most of it is fairly new. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Started With A Traditional Tea But May End Up Saving A Rain Forest

    It also may be helping the climate. The company sources from about 3,000 farmers who tend more than a million trees planted in “forest gardens.” Selling the tea leaves to Runa has created a new source of income for the villagers, who are now getting paid to keep their forests intact, helping them resist the pressure of selling their land to be cleared. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Forests Upwind Affect Cities’ Ozone Pollution

    The way that isoprene, a natural hydrocarbon compound emitted from broadleaf deciduous trees, such as oak, is processed in the atmosphere at night can have a big impact on the ozone in the atmosphere the next day. (Click on title for full story.)

  • 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.)

  • 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.)

  • 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.)

  • Old School Plant Breeding Producing Better Results Than GMO Research

    His work stands out because he has taken an old-school approach. He is leading a renaissance in some conventional crop-breeding techniques that rely on laboriously examining plants’ physical characteristics and then selecting for desirable traits, such as growth or the length of fine roots. And surprisingly, this approach seems to be outpacing the high-tech route. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Spices Come And Spices Go. This Is Not Your Parents’ Caraway

    According to the data, per capita spice consumption nearly tripled over the past half-century, from 1.2 pounds per year in 1966 to 3.4 in 2012. A look at the individual spices, however, shows different stories, with the use of some of the most well-known flavor contributors varying dramatically over the years. (Click on title for full story.)

  • Are Government Tree Planting Schemes Effective Or Just Green Washing?

    Successive governments have made popular pledges to plant large numbers of new trees. But do these trees ever actually get planted and, where they do, does it ever achieve anything useful? (Click on title for full story.)

  • Gran Canaria Island Was Forested Until Early Humans Arrived

    Thanks to the analysis of fossil pollen and charcoal remains, a team of scientists has been able to reconstruct the evolution of the vegetation from Gran Canaria between 4,500 and 1,500 years ago. The study reveals that the disappearance of forests in some parts of the island is in part due to the rise in fires and the cultivation of cereals. Both factors are closely related to the arrival of the first indigenous people to the island. (Click on title for full story.)