Category: Plants & People
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Scale Of Alien Plants’ Invasions Greater Than Predicted
Citing a new global database, an international team of scientists wrote in the journal Nature that 13,168 plant species- 3.9% of the global total – “have become naturalised somewhere on the globe as a result of human activity“
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What Palm Oil Did To Asian Wildlife Is Coming Now To African Wildlife
While the majority of plantations in West Africa are still in the early stages of development, several studies have suggested development on the scale seen in Asia would wipe out forests that are home to primates, posing a greater threat than mining or logging, which are more narrowly destructive.
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Can This Carnivorous Plant Save France From Hornets?
Bee-killing Asian hornets spreading across Europe now face a natural enemy that lures them to destruction – a carnivorous North American plant, French experts say.
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Watermelons Have Been A Delicious Treat For 4000 Years
The diverse evidence, combined, indicates that northeastern Africa is the centre of origin of the dessert watermelon, that watermelons were domesticated for water and food there over 4000 years ago, and that sweet dessert watermelons emerged in Mediterranean lands by approximately 2000 years ago.
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When Urban Trees Make Pollution More Dangerous
The importance of trees is not in question, as protecting our green spaces is vital for the environment on a global scale. However, if we choose to plant trees in our city streets, at a local level, the outcome on air quality may be somewhat different. It is important to consider the type of tree you wish to plant, the shape of the street, what direction the wind blows, and where your pollutant source (cars) and receptors (pedestrians) are located.
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How A Genetic Mutation Created Agriculture
But despite this long history, until now we’ve not been able to answer the important question of how wild barley shifted from dropping its grain to the ground at maturity to the grain staying in the ear – a genetic change that was necessary to allow efficient harvesting of grain. We also haven’t known whether barley domestication stemmed from the one location and time, or happened multiple times.
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If I Could Talk To The Annuals. Grocery Chain Hires “Plant Whisperers”
Britain’s leading hardware store is to employ PLANT WHISPERERS to cultivate in-store flowers by TALKING to them.
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When Conservation Research Endangers The Subject Being Studied
Most studies assume that coring has no impact on tree health –maintaining reproductive output, trunk strength, growth rate and risk of death. However, there is a small body of research that reports significant, sometimes fatal, outcomes, directly attributable to this sampling technique.
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Is This Evidence Of The Earliest Attempts At Agriculture?
This botanical find is really opening new windows to the past
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Abandoning The Botanical Frontier: Where Are The Next Field Botanists?
Many botanists, however, believe that the era of the superstar collector is drawing to a close, at least in the 200-year-old form of a man (or occasionally woman) setting out from Europe or North America to see what the tropics hold. As botany has moved away from taxonomy and towards molecular studies, few of the jobs available allow researchers to spend long periods in the field gaining an encyclopaedic knowledge of plants. Tropical countries have also imposed restrictions on foreign researchers and are developing their own botanical expertise among home-grown scientists.