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future Archives - The Global Plant Council

Scientists Estimate Carbon Stored in African Dryland Trees

By | Forestry, News, Plant Science

Using commercial, high-resolution satellite images and artificial intelligence, an international team mapped almost 10 billion individual trees in Africa’s drylands to assess the amount of carbon stored outside of the continent’s dense tropical forests. The result is the first comprehensive estimate of tree carbon density in the Saharan, Sahel, and Sudanian zones of Africa. The data are free and publicly available. 

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Different blossoming schedules have kept these flowers from driving each other extinct

By | Botany, News

A big part of evolution is competition– when there are limited resources to go around, plants and animals have to duke it out for nutrients, mates, and places to live. That means that the flower-covered meadows of China’s Hengduan mountains were an evolutionary mystery– there are dozens of species of closely-related rhododendrons that all live in harmony. To figure out why, scientists spent a summer carefully documenting the flowering patterns of 34 Rhododendron species, and they discovered the reason why the plants were able to coexist: they burst into bloom at different points in the season so they don’t have to compete for pollinators.

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