Oceanic islands provide useful models for ecology, biogeography and evolutionary research. Many ground-breaking findings – including Darwin’s theory of evolution – have emerged from the study of species on islands and their interplay with their living and non-living environment. Now, an international research team led by the University of Göttingen has investigated the flora of […]
Biotechnology • Food processing • Microbiology • Planetary Science • Plant biology
Could we feed a city on Mars? This question is central to the future of space exploration and has serious repercussions on Earth too. To date, a lot of thought has gone into how astronauts eat; however, we are only beginning to produce food in space. Space launches are quite expensive. And with the growing […]
Plants that inhabit the Earth have the incredible ability to grow continually for hundreds of years, and always towards the light of the sun, which provides them with the necessary energy to sprout. At the source of this growth are changes in their environment, such as variations in light, temperature and humidity. But new stimuli […]
The San Pedro River winds from rainforests in Guatemala through the Yucatan Peninsula in eastern Mexico. There, this peaceful river widens into a series of slow-flowing lakes. Along a remote 50-mile (80-kilometer) stretch, thousands of red mangroves – trees commonly found along tropical coastlines – line the river’s banks and gentle waterfalls. Unlike mangroves elsewhere […]
Is this the first time there has been a fire of this magnitude? If there have been fires like this before, what damage was done to the mountain’s vegetation and how long did it take it to recover? Fires are quite common in the higher areas of Kilimanjaro at the end of the dry seasons […]
Populations are not static, and the geographic distribution of genetic diversity within and among populations is changing continuously. The drivers of genetic differentiation is one of the cornerstones in evolution, as genetic diversity is paramount for the ability of populations to adapt and persist in changing environments. The spatio-temporal changes in genetic diversity constantly taking […]
In great contrast to the native American persimmon, Diospyros virginiana L., which has never advanced beyond the status of a minor fruit, an oriental member of the family Ebenaceae, D. kaki L. f ., is prominent in horticulture. Perhaps best-known in America as the Japanese, or Oriental, persimmon, it is also called kaki (in Spanish […]
Authors: Gerardo Cebrián-Torrejón 1, Michelle Salas Pinel 1,2 1 Laboratoire COVACHIM-M2E EA 3592, Université des Antilles, 97157 Pointe-à-Pitre Cedex. 2 Forest engineer. Heredia. Costa Rica. The Applied Scientific Research Program of Medicinal Plants, k nown as TRAMIL, is an investigation program of traditional and popular medicine from the Caribbean, whose purpose is to rationalize health […]
The history of Earth climate is characterized by a succession of glacial and interglacial periods. However, although climate change is inherent to Earth, the observed trend of temperature increase over the past century cannot be explained by climate models which include solar irradiance and are only explicable by the rise in greenhouse gases. Mauna Loa […]
Naturalists and scientists have been collecting plants or plant parts during centuries to make collections and catalogues known as herbaria (sing. herbarium) that have been traditionally used for comparative taxonomy and systematics research. The first herbarium collections were compiled along with the foundation of botanical gardens during the first half of the 16th century. The […]