Conservation / Tree Health

 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.

In commemoration of the day of the tree, yesterday June 15, 2020 we started planting 500 trees at the Horizontes Forestry Experimental Station , the goal at the end of the year is to plant 10,000 trees in fragile sites of the Station.

As bushfires blackened forests last summer, one tree species was protected by a specialist team of firefighters: the Wollemi pine.

These trees have a deeply ancient lineage dating back to when dinosaurs walked Gondwana 100 million years ago. Back then, rainforests—including Wollemi pines (or their cousins) – covered what became Australia.

An international team of scientists have identified candidate resistance genes that could protect ash trees from the Emerald Ash Borer (EAB), a deadly pest that is expected to kill billions of trees worldwide.

In the new study, published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution, researchers from Queen Mary University of London and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, sequenced the genomes of 22 species of ash tree (Fraxinus) from around the world and used this information to analyse how the different species are related to each other.