Category

Botany

Climate change is affecting when and how violets reproduce

By | Botany, Climate change, News

Violets reproduce both sexually, through cross-pollination of the showy flowers we’re familiar with; and asexually, by self-seeding of less noticeable flowers that remain hidden near the base of the plant. This is called “mixed mating.” Although environmental factors drive how much a plant reproduces sexually or asexually, no study had previously looked at the impact of climate change on mixed mating.

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Indigenous Borneans knew a tree was two distinct species— genetic analysis confirms they were right

By | Botany, News, Plant Science

Over 200 years ago, a Spanish botanist described Artocarpus odoratissimus, a species of fruit-bearing tree found in Borneo and the Philippines. The Iban people, who are indigenous to Borneo, know the tree to have two different varieties, which they call lumok and pingan, distinguished by their fruit size and shape. Despite this knowledge, Western botanists have long considered the tree as a single species, but a genetic analysis confirms the Iban people were right all along.

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Checklist of Vascular Plants Unveils Flora of Taita Hills in Kenya

By | Botany, CSPB, News

As a part of the global biodiversity hotspots, the Taita Hills forests, located in Taita Taveta County in southeastern Kenya, forms the northernmost tip of the Eastern Arc Mountains. They are highly fragmented forests embedded in a human settlements and farms on the slopes and hilltops, resulting in the loss of 98% of the original forest cover on those mountains.  Despite several botanical explorations and extensive floristic studies in these mountainous areas, there is a clear lack of sufficient literature on the flora and vegetation of the area. Through a joint effort, several field expeditions were carried out between 2015 and 2019, with an effort put to expand geographical coverage to areas where plant collections were previously scarce.  

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Lost South American wildflower named “extinctus” rediscovered (but still endangered)

By | Botany, News, Plant Science

For a tropical wildflower first described by scientists in 2000, the scientific name “extinctus” was a warning. The orange wildflower had been found 15 years earlier in an Ecuadorian forest that had since been largely destroyed; the scientists who named it suspected that by the time they named it, it was already extinct. But in a new paper researchers report the first confirmed sightings of Gasteranthus extinctus in 40 years.

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