New research has revealed that plants make their own ‘secret’ decisions about how much carbon to release back into the atmosphere via a previously unknown process, a discovery with “profound implications” for the use of plants as carbon stores.
Although about 20% of Illinois cropping systems are planted to continuous corn, it’s nearly impossible to find fields planted this way for decades at a time. Yet long-term experiments, including over 40 years of continuous corn under different nitrogen fertilizer rates, provide incredible learning opportunities and soil management lessons for researchers and farmers alike.
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.
Researchers find that local community perceptions of ecosystem services provided by symbolic wild cherry trees could be used in community-based management and conservation of traditional forest landscapes in Japan.
Researchers are forecasting that by 2040-60, Sosnowsky’s hogweed will likely exploit global warming to expand its habitat, threatening to infest almost the entire European part of Russia.
The length of time a flower remained open (i.e., from anthesis to flower senescence) is called floral longevity. Floral longevity has been considered as one of the most important reproductive traits as it determines opportunities for pollen dispersal and capture of pollen by stigmas as well as has the potential to influence intra pollinator foraging and opportunities for geitonogamous self-pollination.
Scientists have grown plants in soil from the Moon, a first in human history and a milestone in lunar and space exploration.
In a recent study a team of
researchers tested the potential for increased plant productivity and intrinsic water-use efficiency through the overexpression of inorganic carbon transporter B (ictB) in field-grown tobacco. However, their results showed no significant difference between the field-grown ictB expressing tobacco lines and wild-type.
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.
New insights into the evolutionary origins of unique African high mountain botanical diversity.
