Latest Vegetation Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online More than a hundred years of growth data on individual plants has been digitized by a team of researchers at the University of Arizona’s Tumamoc Hill. The team has made this data available for study by people around the globe. New insights into the behavior of ecosystems can be developed by knowing how plants respond to changing conditions over many decades. Tumamoc Hill’s permanent research plots represent the world’s...

University of Zurich The climate governs the seasonal activity of vegetation; humankind influences it. In the humid mid-latitudes, temperature is the largest influencing factor for plant growth. In predominantly dry areas, however, it is the availability of water and in the high latitudes incident solar radiation. Without a doubt, humankind also has a modifying impact on the ecosystem. Satellites have been recording how the vegetation on the Earth's surface is changing since the 1980s....

MORRISTOWN, N.J., Aug. 27, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Throughout August and September, Jersey Central Power & Light (JCP&L) will perform vegetation management work in 24 New Jersey municipalities as part of the electric utility's program to improve reliability throughout its service territory. "Before the end of the year we expect to trim more than 3,900 miles of lines, improve clearances, remove dangerous trees and perform additional spot trimming," said Holly Kauffman,...

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- According to the American Heart Association approximately 15,000 people in the United States each year are diagnosed with infective endocarditis. Researchers are breaking ground on a new surgery to prevent this disease from causing death. Infective endocarditis is an infection that affects some part of the endocardium. The endocardium is the tissue that lines the inside of the heart chambers. The infection usually involves one or more heart valves which are part of...

Climate change is widely expected to disrupt future fire patterns around the world, with some regions, such as the western United States, seeing more frequent fires within the next 30 years, according to a new analysis led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with an international team of scientists. By the end of the century, almost all of North America and most of Europe is projected to see a jump in the frequency of wildfires, primarily because of...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com Scientists may have finally established the explanation for the disappearance of the giant koala and other Australian megafauna. Between 50,000 and 45,000 years ago, around 60 species of mammals, predominantly foraging herbivores called browsers, went extinct. These animals included 19 species that weighed over 100 kilograms, like the rhinoceros-sized giant wombat and half-ton marsupial Palorchestes azael. Slightly smaller animals like the flightless bird...

A modeling study from the European Alps suggests that population declines to be observed during the upcoming decades will probably underestimate the long-term effects of recent climate warming on mountain plants. A European team of ecologists around Stefan Dullinger from the Department of Conservation Biology, Vegetation and Landscape Ecology of the University of Vienna presents a new modeling tool to predict migration of mountain plants which explicitly takes population dynamic processes...

Unprecedented long-term study conducted over 14-year period at U's Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve Vegetation, such as a patch of prairie or a forest stand, is more productive in the long run when more plant species are present, a new University of Minnesota study shows. The unprecedented long-term study of plant biodiversity found that each species plays a role in maintaining a productive ecosystem, especially when a long time horizon is considered. The study found that every...

By analyzing vegetation information collected by satellites over time instead of for just one day, scientists in the Michigan State University Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability (CSIS) have developed a novel procedure to assess the composition of plant species in an area. Researchers long have used multi-spectral images (which include radiation outside human perception, such as infrared) and other remotely sensed data to create maps of vegetation around the globe. But...

The city of Manila holds the human world record for the most densely populated space and now an international team of ecologists are seeking the natural equivalent, the most species rich area on earth. The team's findings, published in the Journal of Vegetation Science, reveal the record is contested between South America's tropical rainforests and Central European meadows. "The coexistence of large numbers of species in one space and the questions it raises have long fascinated...