Drought and heat wave killing shade trees across Missouri – ‘Paper-dry to the core’

By Sarah Baraba24 July 2012 The iconic 145-foot Sugarberry Tree in Kirkwood Park has weathered a lighting strike, rotor wash from a Marine helicopter and more than 150 years of unpredictable St. Louis weather, but the recent heat wave was the last straw in its battle to survive. Just as the sun was rising above […]

Graph of the Day: Observed and Experimental Sensitivity of Plants to Global Warming

This trend is seen in the observational studies (blue) but not in the experimental studies (red). The numbers correspond to those in Fig. 1 and to site information given in the Supplementary Information. ABSTRACT: Warming experiments are increasingly relied on to estimate plant responses to global climate change1, 2. For experiments to provide meaningful predictions […]

Plant study flags dangers of warming world

By Nina Chestney; Editing by Janet Lawrence2 May 2012 LONDON (Reuters) – Plants are flowering faster than scientists predicted in response to climate change, research in the United States showed on Wednesday, which could have devastating knock-on effects for food chains and ecosystems. Global warming is having a significant impact on hundreds of plant and […]

New genetically modified crops could make superweeds even stronger

By Brandon Keim 1 May 2012 Herbicide-resistant superweeds threaten to overgrow U.S. fields, so agriculture companies have genetically engineered a new generation of plants to withstand heavy doses of multiple, extra-toxic weed-killing chemicals. It’s a more intensive version of the same approach that made the resistant superweeds such a problem — and some scientists think […]

Climate change helps then quickly stunts plant growth, decade-long study shows

9 April 2012 (NAU) – Global warming may initially make the grass greener, but not for long, according to new research conducted at Northern Arizona University. The study, published this week in Nature Climate Change, shows that plants may thrive in the early stages of a warming environment but begin to deteriorate quickly. “We were […]

Amateur naturalists help track shifting seasons as climate changes

By David Richardson9 Apr 2012 Susan Peters, who moved from the East Coast to Tucson, Ariz., a couple of years ago, calls her adopted town an “oasis” — never mind that it only gets 12.6 inches of rain each year on average. “I have a very green, beautiful yard with desert-adapted plants, not the East […]

Which plants will survive droughts, climate change?

By Stuart Wolpert5 April 2012 New research by UCLA life scientists could lead to predictions of which plant species will escape extinction from climate change. Droughts are worsening around the world, posing a great challenge to plants in all ecosystems, said Lawren Sack, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and senior author of […]

Graph of the Day: Total Annual Area Occupied by Overwintering Monarch Butterflies, 1994-2011

The total annual area occupied by overwintering monarch butterflies from 1994 through 2011 has declined significantly, with the all-time smallest area reported during the 2009–10 overwintering season. The dashed line shows the 17-year average (7.24 ha). Both linear (upper) and exponential (lower) regression lines are included. Abstract: During the 2009–2010 overwintering season and following a 15-year […]

Study ties GMO corn, soybeans to monarch butterfly decline

By JOSEPHINE MARCOTTY, Star Tribune 16 March 2012 Genetically engineered corn and soybeans make it easy for farmers to eradicate weeds, including the long-lived and unruly milkweed. But they might be putting the monarch butterfly in peril. The rapid spread of herbicide-resistant crops has coincided with — and may explain — the dramatic decline in […]

Brick kiln emissions reduce crop yields, damage trees

By Faisal Raza Khan6 March 2012 ISLAMABAD – Hydrogen fluoride emissions from brick kilns have been found to damage trees and crops in new studies conducted by an international team of scientists in the Peshawar area of northern Pakistan. Peshawar has 450 brick kilns and hydrogen fluoride is also released by factories making aluminium, ceramics, […]

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