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Category: Plants & People

  • Fatal Beauty: Over Collecting ‘Everlasting’ Flowers Threatens Plants And People

    Today, the mesmerizing flowers have become a potent symbol for a challenge facing Brazilian anthropologists: How can their knowledge of the lives of traditional people—including the migrant flower collectors—be used to help preserve the natural resources these people depend upon? And can a balance be struck between conservation and the economic needs of the people? (Click on title or image for full story)

  • Terrifying Tumbleweed Attack

    If you were a plant designer commissioned to mess with farmers, you would probably come up with something like a tumbleweed. When germinating, tumbleweed seedlings outcompete native plants, and suck up enough water to parch neighboring crops. After they drop from their stems, the vagabond husks often rove in packs, clogging irrigation systems, carrying bugs and diseases, and taking up space where cows could be. (Click on title or image for full story. Be sure to watch the video.)

  • How A Simple Test Of Seed Dormancy Became The World’s Longest Running Experiment

    When he buried those bottles 137 years ago, Dr. Beal didn’t aim to start the As the World Turns of garden experiments. As a botanist at an agricultural school, he was just trying to find a rigorous answer to a question that has dogged farmers for millennia: how many times do you have to pull up weeds before they stop growing back? (Click on title or image for full story.)

  • Reforestation Project Changes Communities And Women’s Lives

    The government has turned forest restoration into a business model by outsourcing nurseries to the private sector, including widows, poor women and young people. This provides the government with saplings to plant, as well as green jobs for the community. (Click on title or image for full story.)

  • The Decline Of Agrodiversity Will Not Go Well For Us

    Globally, foods have become more alike and less diverse. As the amount of food around the world has shrunk to just a handful of crops, regional and local crops have become scarce or disappeared altogether. Wheat, rice and corn, plus palm oil and soybeans, are what we all eat now — the same type and the same amount.Yes, this increase in carbs, fats and proteins has helped feed hungry people, but on a global scale i t’s also increased our chances of becoming …“stuffed and starved.” The world overconsumes energy-dense foods but eats fewer foods rich in micronutrients (Click on title or image for full story)

  • Tattooed Botanist Describes (Yet Another) New Plant Species

    The new species is distinguished from several dozen other species of Calathea by the shape of its leaves. In addition, the new species’ one-to-four inflorescences–flower-bearing structures–are produced on a shoot that extends along the ground from an underground stem (rhizome), a very unusual plant character. (Click on title or image for full story.)

  • Will “Resurrection Plants” Revolutionize Food Production?

    Resurrection plants have many of the same genes in their roots and leaves as seeds, so now she is trying to work out how to switch those genes in wheat, rice and maize crops so that they can survive droughts. (Click on title or image for full story.)

  • Maybe It Takes A Society To Save Large-Fruited Rain Forest Trees

    If an area becomes devoid of rainforest and is then recolonised and there are no animals capable of dispersing large-fruited species, it becomes recolonised only by small-fruited species. So you lose a whole component of your biodiversity because there’s no mechanism to bring the large-fruited species back. (Click on image or title for full story)

  • Seaweed Is Becoming Big Business In Maine

    The state now supports more than 20 companies that grow or collect seaweed, about double from 10 years ago. Maine harvesters collected 17.7 million pounds of seaweed in 2014—the most ever recorded for the state and more than four times the 2004 total. )Click on image or title for full story.)

  • How Pumpkins Replaced Mastodon Seed Dispersal With Humans’

    When mastodons and mammoths went extinct in the Americas, wild squash too, saw drastic decline, archaeological evidence shows. “The plants lost their primary means of seed dispersal,” At that time, squash switched partners in its evolutionary dance. (Click image or title for full story.)