In an effort to receive advanced warning of destructive pests that could wreak havoc on native plantings, researchers from Europe, the United States and China are growing "sentinel trees" in strategic locations around the world.
The Hawaiian Rare Plant Program laboratory has successfully grown approximately 300 of the 1,400 known Hawaiian plant taxa using micropropagation techniques.
The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Lyon Arboretum’s efforts to protect threatened native plant species serve as a model for other areas of conservation concern.
Cederberg, South Africa (CNN) The rugged and beautiful Cederberg Mountains in South Africa's Western Cape are named after one of the rarest trees on the planet. The Clanwilliam cedar lives nowhere else in the world.
This iconic species originated up to 225 million years ago and survived the last ice age. But today it is critically endangered and its future hangs in the balance.
Acute Oak Decline (AOD) and Chronic Oak Dieback (sometimes called Chronic Oak Decline (COD)) are two concerning diseases affecting the UK’s iconic oak trees. Both seriously affect the health of oak trees, and both can eventually kill the tree. AOD inflicts blisters and black bleeds on the trunk and branches of the tree, while COD targets the tree’s ‘central nervous system’, its roots, truncating its ability to take up water and nutrients and forcing leaves and branches to dieback.
GAINSVILLE, Fla. – Native trees that once dominated the landscape of Tulare County may be part of the answer to protecting one of the county’s most profitable tree crops.
LONDON — Britain is to help protect Australia's biodiversity in the emergency collection of plant seeds following the country's devastating wildfires.
Scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London will help with emergency seed-collecting in areas devastated by the bushfires and store specimens at its Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) in Britain.
Kew’s MSB works as an insurance policy against plant extinction so they can be protected for the future.
According to Dr. Dave Kendal from the University of Tasmania, in the next 50 years, 20-50% of current plant species in botanic gardens and urban landscapes will likely confront temperatures those species have never experienced before.
Last month, as the State closed on one of its hottest and driest years on record, a giant White Oak (Quercus alba), that had stood for over 150 years on the famous Oak Lawn at Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, simply collapsed, leaving a gaping hole in the City's most iconic landscape.
Faced with deforestation, climate change, invasive pests, and new diseases, many trees are in trouble. Foresters and conservationists are scrambling to save them, but can’t protect every stand of woods. And prioritizing which places—and even which individual trees—warrant preservation has been a challenge. For example, “You want a lot of genetic diversity in a conservation area. … The higher the diversity, the more the chances that the population will survive,” says F. A. (Phil) Aravanopoulos, a forest geneticist at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
Long-lived humans having nothing on trees. Some forest giants, like the Ginkgo biloba, can live more than 3000 years. Now, in the most comprehensive plant aging study to date, researchers have revealed the molecular mechanisms that allow the ginkgo—and perhaps other trees—to survive so long.
The new study provides the first real genetic evidence for something scientists have long suspected: “The default condition in plants is immortality,” says Howard Thomas, a plant biologist from Aberystwyth University who was not involved in the work.
A potential ally for one of North America’s most embattled trees has passed its first big test. A tiny predatory beetle that researchers have been rearing and releasing into forests appears to be doing damage to an aphidlike pest that poses a deadly threat to ecologically important eastern hemlock trees, a 5-year study has found.
