An excellent overview of the phenomenon - how people don't see plants - from Tuesday's Science Times.
We barely notice plants, can rarely identify them and find them incomparably inert. “Animals are much more vivid to the average person than plants are,” Dr. Raven said, “and some people aren’t even sure that plants are alive.”
*sigh* sadly, it's true. Although, in my experience, people do notice trees, and care a heck of a lot about garden flora.
The spectacular bloom of a magnolia may be a very common sight in gardens, but in the wild it is a different story.
A new report has found that over half the world's magnolia species are
facing extinction in their forest habitats. To wit, the sweetbay magnolia pictured here
I think I'm going to present this botanical news in an order other than presented in the title - so as to be more "uplifting", like a Frank Capra film.
First, the flora.
CHECKLIST AND ATLAS OF THE VASCULAR FLORA OF WEST VIRGINIA
This 381-page printed document includes a series of completely revised lists of the vascular plants known to occur outside of cultivation in West Virginia and a dot map indicating from which counties each of the 2503 taxa is recorded.
But wait, there's more! You'll also get -
* a reference to names and classification of all the ferns, trees,wildflowers and other vascular plants and the counties in the state in which they occur;
* which species are native, introduced, adventive, or exotic;
* which are classified as wetland species, which may be invasive to natural areas;
* those needing further field work,
* those needing systematic study, and
* those tracked by the West Virginia Natural Heritage program as state rare.
Here's how to get yours!
Now, for the infuriating...
Again, US Fish and Wildlife does the bidding of their boss, the most unenvironmentally savvy President to ever walk the earth. May his days be filled with his own, personal global warming.
Fury sprouts over agency's failure to protect rare, local plant
from The Daily Sentinel
Raising the ire of conservationists, a rare plant that exists almost
entirely within areas that have been leased for oil and gas development in Mesa and Garfield counties will not be protected under the Endangered Species Act in the foreseeable future, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Wednesday...
And a feel good story if there ever was one - how botany brings the people of the world together (see photo).
from The Berkleyan
A plant-based diet for small-planet diplomats
Can botanical exchanges between the U.S. and Iran play the peacemaking role that ping-pong did 30 years ago?
As measured by international time zones or teenage girls' hemlines, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the American West are worlds apart. Yet as viewed through the lens of geography, geology, or climate, the nation- state and western United States have worlds in common . sharing not only the same northern latitudes but, in significant measure, important topographical features (large central plateaus, with interior-draining basins, lying between mountain ranges), Mediterranean climates, active earthquake faults, and (due in large part to these other similarities) a notably rich flora, with hundreds of plant species in common...
Can't you just feel the love?
The curator holds an herbarium sheet. These are invaluable for determining historical floristic compositions of an area, among other things.
(For more about herbarium sheets and their botanical role - click on "store")
The article "New exhibit focuses on invasive plants," is about a new exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, features images of invasive and endangered Pennsylvania plants. The display — both informative and elegant — is a combination of drawings, paintings, etchings, and giclées (digital prints).
Overall the article does a good job of framing the issues, with the exception of the author's final comment about cultivars that "are native plants" that "can satisfy a consumer's wants without harming the environment." This is not entirely true, but that discussion is a post in and of itself.
Educating the public about the ecological costs of invasives is important, as they continue to devastate our systems. Case in point, newly published research shows how a honeysuckle shrub (Lonicera mackii) used in gardens and landscapes harms forests by disturbing the understory layer, tree reproduction and mature tree productivity.
Hardwood stands from southwestern Ohio had noticeably lower species diversity and vegetation cover below the shrubs to detect growth changes 25 years prior to and 25 years following invasion. The growth rates of overstory trees was reduced significantly. The effect of this slowdown were first observed about 6 yrs after invasion with the greatest frequency of negative growth changes occurring 20 yrs after invasion.
The abstract - Hardwood forest invasion by a non-indigenous shrub (Amur honeysuckle) negatively affects overstory productivity (a pdf)
More on the invasiveness of shrub honeysuckles
Anthropologie's store windows and displays have me upset. They feature a lot of moss - wait, let me rephrase that - A LOT OF MOSS (and liverworts in there too) and fungi, mostly shelf fungi. I wish I had a picture...
Anyway, far too much, in just the one store. And how many other stores have the same displays? Why worry, you ask? Because, where do they get these biological elements? They are harvested from the wild. Probably with permits, but still, what is the ecological repercussion(s) of this? {My concerns also apply to mining peat moss for orchids and garden beds - bad, bad, bad).
This study, sadly, supports my sadness.
Yearly revenues from sales of commercial moss harvest permits were reported to be 
US$19,650. In contrast, estimates of total harvests based on export data and assumptions about those data suggest that the mean yearly harvest for the years 1998–2003 was between 4.6 and 18.4 million air-dry kg (yearly minimum and maximum estimated at 0.9 and 37.4 million air-dry kg, respectively). Moss sales (domestic plus exports) are estimated to total between US$˜6 million and 165 million per year. The wide ranges in these estimates illustrate how little is known about the moss harvest trade. In combination with lack of information about the size of the moss inventory, reaccumulation rates, and species and ecosystem functions potentially affected by harvest, results indicate that policy makers and land managers lack critical information on which to base harvest regulations.
Preserving endangered plant populations can be very straight forward. Save a site from development, save the plants. Other times it is complicated. This story is the latter, and why gardening and restoration, albeit noble and important, are no substitute for conservation.
This story is about the Presidio clarkia (Clarkia franciscana) pictured above and two gardeners who thought they were "helping".
Horticultural 'bad guys' meant well
NO MATTER HOW you look at it, Concord resident Bob Case is an unlikely villain in a recent kerfuffle over the Presidio clarkia, a delicate little blossom that grows in only two places in the world -- San Francisco's Presidio and on a small patch of the Oakland hills.
Read more of the story
Learn more about Presidio clarkia
A historical collection of NJ Pinelands botanical drawings was acquired by the Alexander Library of Rutgers University (my alma mater). This collection of black-and-white illustrations was created by Dr. Albert List, Jr. (1928-2005). List was a botany professor at Drexel University with an interest in field botany and a training in art. Included in this donated collection are an estimated 1000 drawings of vascular plants (a few insects and several mosses, lichens, etc too), unpublished manuscripts, and notes. What a boon to local botanists!
More on Albert List.
global warming and fall foliage
Say it ain't so!
Some climatologists have said that even if steps are taken now to limit global warming, temperatures in New England will rise enough over the next half-century that the source of much of that rich fall color, the sugar maples (Acer saccharum), will disappear from most of the region. Healthy stands of sugar maples may be found eventually no farther south than Canada and northern Maine.
Haven't we been telling you that herbarium sheets are the foundation of all that is good and pure in the world? What is an herbarium sheet, you say? See this (then click on "store").
An old photograph shows that on Memorial Day, 1868, the deciduous trees in Lowell Cemetery in Massachusetts had yet to leaf out. On Memorial Day, 2005, they stood in full verdure. Leafing or flowering dates each year depend on temperature, and global warming has been driving those events earlier in many places. Plants take part in many ecological interactions—with their pollinators, for instance—that are precisely timed. Changes in their seasonal development may therefore bring on broader ecological disruptions. Records of past plant development are scarce, though, so analyzing trends in timing has been difficult.
Now Abraham J. Miller-Rushing and Richard B. Primack, both ecologists at Boston University et al. have compared dated historical photographs, as well as dated herbarium specimens, of plants in flower in eastern Massachusetts, with recent observations of the same species. The plants now flower about eleven days earlier than they did a hundred years ago, when the region was 4.5 Fahrenheit degrees cooler. Their findings echo independent estimates from other data, confirming that old photographs and herbarium specimens are reliable sources for climate-change research. (American Journal of Botany, in press, 2006)
Organic farms are better for wildlife than those run conventionally, according to a study covering 180 farms from Cornwall to Cumbria.
The organic farms were found to contain 85% more plant species, 33% more bats, 17% more spiders and 5% more birds.
Read article from BBC news
This website is a wonderful introduction to the world according to insects. It is easy for us humans to forget that flowers look as they do not to draw satified sighs from gardeners but to attract potential pollinators - critical to their survival. And what we see is not the whole story.
Here is Pacific silverweed (Potentilla anserina) to humans:
And here is what insects see:
A tribal community in Kenya is planning to take a United Nations agency to the International Court of Justice in The Hague for introducing a harmful tree (the mesquite - Prosopis juliflora) to the country. The action, thought to be a world first, is being brought by the Ilchamus people of the Rift Valley, again the Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Read more
And people think plants are boring! Below is an excerpt of Dr. Valerie Eviner work on how plant species affect ecosystem processes with Institue for Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, NY.
Plants not only respond to their environment, but also actively alter their habitat. Different plant species can have distinct effects on almost every aspect of ecosystem structure and function. However, most studies investigating the effects of plant species on ecosystems have focused on one type of effect (e.g. N cycling, water dynamics, erosion, effects on other organisms). In order to understand and predict the ecosystem consequences of vegetation change, it is vital to consider the multiple, simultaneous roles that species play in ecosystems. These functions are often distributed independently among species.
More on this study
More on Dr. Eviner's work
JUST about everyone in Los Angeles has a cause, but Rene Russo's is a decidedly lonely mission. While many of her Hollywood peers use their celebrity to exalt the hybrid Prius or bash Republicans, she is championing plants that many homeowners are unfamiliar with or, worse, dismiss as weeds.
Ms. Russo has become an advocate for the use of California native plants, which she is trying to promote as a low-maintenance panacea for the region's water supply uncertainties.
"People have equated natives with chaparral, with brush, with dead, and it's erroneous," she said with obvious frustration in an interview at her Brentwood home.
"I love the garden more than the house," Ms. Russo said as she walked down the rugged paths of her property.Back to Nature & What a Mess - from today's New York Times
An excellent example human's unexpected consequences on the landscape. Here, Anne Raver's struggles to contain the invasive tree - black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) on the family farm. Anne, I feel your pain. However, I wish she had discussed & compare the ecological roles of native early successional trees & exotic invasives - they are quite different. When the latter dominates an area, it is not succession, nor is it competition or evolution - it is an invasion. All our open space, even so called "pristine" landscapes, need to be nudged along. We are now in the sad position of having to manage lands just to enable processes that should occur normally on their own.
More about black locusts
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