Areas with low tree coverage and poor soil quality are more likely to experience flood and drought, as the soil is less able to retain excess rainwater writes Jacqueline Skalski-Fouts.
Humanitarian crises have recently been declared in Sudan, Yemen, Niger, Mali, and Somalia—affecting at least 450,000 people—due to flash floods and landslides.
The City of Cape Town has completed South Africa’s first ever tree mapping project. This project identified all the trees within the city, providing clear data on the development of the city’s urban forest.
Cape Town has not quite reached the definition of an urban forest according to the United Nations. Rather than the required continuous 10% of tree canopy cover required, the city currently has 7%.
Researchers have found a way to tackle a disease that threatens thousands of hectares of Alpine forests each year.
Needle bladder rust causes Norway spruce needles to yellow and fall out, causing a significant reduction in growth.
Scientists in Austria have unlocked a natural defence mechanism that the species can use to fend off the potentially fatal pathogen.
The findings have been published in the BMC Genomics journal.
The world is experiencing a sixth global mass extinction event, and a new paper advocates that botanical gardens are uniquely positioned to preserve the world's plant diversity.
Construction on an exciting new facility which will house 250 years worth of plantlife has begun at The Australian Botanic Garden, Mount Annan.
A host of politicians visited the gardens this week to mark the start of works on the $60 million National Herbarium of NSW, which will feature more than 1.4 million botanical specimens once complete.
The specimen collection is moving to Mount Annan from Sydney as part of the build, which was originally announced in the 2018 budget.
Hawaii is home to a rich variety of unique flora. The National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG), headquartered in Kalāheo, Hawaii, is focused on protecting and conserving native plants throughout the tropical regions of the Pacific. With roughly 2,000 acres of land, NTBG’s expansive gardens have become an example of natural biodiversity preservation. Many of these species are found exclusively in Hawaii — some, found in a singular valley.
The eastern hemlock is not one of those ubiquitous, celebrity trees such as the white oak or the white pine. Throughout much of its range — from northern Alabama up to New Brunswick, Canada, and Minnesota — the hemlock has lurked mainly in dark mountain valleys, where the cool, moist climate favored it over competitors. In northern states and Canada, it mixed with sugar maple, beech and other cold-hardy forest dwellers.
Every reforestation project is a little different. Every place on the planet is facing their own unique challenges. In light of these challenges, places like Uganda and Tanzania are finding ways to make reforestation more than just environmentally beneficial, but also socially and economically too.
Trees do not pay taxes. Some seem to avoid death as well. Many of the world’s most ancient organisms are trees, including a 3,600-year-old cypress in Chile and a sacred fig in Sri Lanka that was planted in the third century B.C.
If you were dropped into virtually any region of North America 56 million years ago, you probably would not recognize where you had landed. Back then, at the dawn of the Eocene epoch, the earth was warmer and wetter than it is today. A sea had just closed up in the middle of the Great Plains, and the Rocky Mountains had not yet attained their full height. The continent's plant and animal communities were dramatically different.
