Conservation / Tree Health

By Clothilde Goujard

Thousands of small test tubes were set up in neatly organized rows in the cupboards of Armand Séguin’s laboratory.

Soon, the scientist would be filling them up with sap squeezed from the bark of ash trees.

Séguin has been studying cancer for more than two decades. Now he's turned his expertise to stopping the spread of the destructive emerald ash borer, a green metallic-looking beetle that is smaller than a fingernail.

By Susan Milius

An invasive beetle has unexpected — and potentially troublesome — tastes in trees. Now two new studies are clarifying the insects’ dining habits, researchers reported at the annual Entomological Society of America meeting.

By Tom Ough

If there is such a thing as national talents, then the English are peerless in their acquisitive eye for a symbol. Lion? Just because the king of the jungle isn’t indigenous to Europe doesn’t mean he can’t have a Union flag draped over his haunch. Tea? Our temperate maritime climate is no good for cultivating tea shrubs, but their boiled leaves still make our national drink.

We know what makes a good emblem. Marmalade is Roman. Doesn’t matter. Queuing is universal. Ditto. Morris dancing is Spanish (look it up).

Teamwork between Forest Research, Bangor University and others has for the first time, tracked down the cause of the stem bleeding symptoms of this newly identified threat to the native oak.

Planting forests and other activities that harness the power of nature could play a major role in limiting global warming under the 2015 Paris agreement, an international study showed on Monday.

Natural climate solutions, also including protection of carbon-storing peatlands and better management of soils and grasslands, could account for 37% of all actions needed by 2030 under the 195-nation Paris plan, it said.

Combined, the suggested “regreening of the planet” would be equivalent to halting all burning of oil worldwide, it said.

At the last election, the Conservative Party promised to plant millions of trees. But, as Reality Check correspondent Chris Morris reports, it is going to have to dramatically speed up the planting to meet the target.

Campaigners have called on the government to do more to address the "unacceptably low" level of woodland cover in the United Kingdom, arguing it is causing the country both economic and environmental damage.

BGCI’s recent gap analysis has identified 20 Angiosperm families and almost 7,000 threatened tree species that appear to be completely missing from botanic garden living collections.

Download the lists here, and let us know if you have any of these plants in your collections.

Angiosperm family list