Plants

Human-Driven Fires Have Shaped The Amazonian Forest For Over 10,000 Years

Conservation, Nature, Plants, Pollinators, Wildlife / /

New research is dismantling the long-standing myth of the “pristine” Amazon. A reconstruction of 10,000 years of Amazonian pyrogeography, based on 1,361 radiocarbon (¹⁴C) dates across 303 sites – including soil charcoal and burned archaeological material – shows that fire in the rainforest is almost exclusively a human-driven phenomenon, not a natural one. Over the

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New “devil flower” species discovered in Thai national park

Birds, Conservation, Nature, Plants, Pollinators, Wildlife / /

Researchers have described a new species of leafless flowering plant found on the forest floor of a national park in western Thailand, and its otherworldly appearance has earned it a fittingly dramatic name: Thismia daemona, the “devil flower”. The species belongs to Thismia, a genus of small plants sometimes called “fairy lanterns”. Unlike most plants,

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A honey bee colony does not follow a calendar. Should its model?

Birds, Conservation, Nature, Plants, Pollinators / /

Guest blog post by Dominik Lammers Models help us ask a deceptively simple question: if the world works in a particular way, what should we expect to happen? For honey bee colonies, answering that question is difficult. A colony’s development depends on food, weather, disease, the surrounding landscape, and the behaviour of thousands of individual

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