A research team has successfully quantified and visualised the impact of Hong Kong air pollution especially ozone pollutant on plants and the environment. Although the experiment took place in a rural area and in Spring, which would usually have a lower average ozone concentration, the pollutant level still reached high enough to do significant damage.
Plant breeding has considerably increased agricultural yields in recent decades and thus made a major contribution to combating global hunger and poverty. At the same time, however, the intensification of farming has had negative environmental effects. Increases in food production will continue to be crucial for the future because the world population and demand continue to grow. A recent study shows that new plant breeding technologies – such as genetic engineering and gene editing – can help to increase food production whilst being more environmentally friendly.
Staying on top of these collections is time-consuming during the best of times, and this task becomes even more complex in the age of social distancing. Yet thousands of scientists across the globe are doing just that, maintaining everything from crickets, to tissue cultures, mice, powdery mildews, nematodes, psyllids, zebrafish and even rust fungi.
Glyphosate is a widely used broad-spectrum herbicide that targets both broadleaf plants and grasses (dicots and monocots). This recent work aids our understanding of adaptive evolution in amaranth plants and has implications for optimizing pesticide use in the environment.
Some flowers have a remarkable and previously unknown ability to bounce back after injury, according to a new study. Some injured flowers bent and twisted themselves back into the best possible position to ensure successful reproduction within 10-48 hours of being knocked over, for example, by falling branches or being walked on.
A new global study reveals the extent to which high-yielding rice varieties favored in the decades since the “Green Revolution” have a propensity to go feral, turning a staple food crop into a weedy scourge.
We are living through an explosion in the availability of microbiome data. In agricultural systems, the proliferation of research on plant and soil microbiomes has been coupled with excitement for the potential that microbiome data may have for the development of novel, sustainable, and effective crop management strategies. However, while this is an exciting development, as the collective body of microbiome data for diverse crops grows, the lack of consistency in recording data makes it harder for the data to be utilized across research projects.
Unless it happens to be allergy season, most people don’t give a lot of thought to pollen. But new research might change the way we look at a field of flowers. A study suggests that pollen color can evolve independently from flower traits, and that plant species maintain both light and dark pollen because each offers distinct survival advantages.
Over the course of forest succession, both components of plant residues and the structure of soil microbial communities play important roles in affecting soil aggregates, and thus the sequestration and stability of soil organic carbon. However, up till now there is still a lack of holistic understanding of the interactions among root turnover, microbial community composition, chemical composition of plant residues and different sized soil aggregates.
A team of researchers has conducted an economic impact study for the olive industry in Europe’s three primary olive-producing countries in light of the arrival of Xylella fastidiosa, a deadly olive tree pathogen. In their paper the group describes their study of the losses the industry is facing if drastic measures are not taken.
