I spent some time over the past week looking into how we can all contribute to fungi conservation- since fungal conservation doesn’t get as much attention as plant and animal conservation, there aren’t as many international organizations or projects that are seeking support. Instead, it seems like smaller, more local groups are more prevalent. And […]
Archive for the ‘conservation’ Tag
Keeping tabs on fungi
No room for spores
As I mentioned in my last post, there are a number of issues facing fungi around the world. Researchers continue to look into how best to support fungi populations, but it seems like there are some patterns to effective fungi conservation– we need to know which fungi are present, we need to look at microhabitat […]
Dwindling fungi?
A brief search through the literature resulted in quite a few studies and even a few books about fungi conservation, so I feel pretty confident in saying that people are paying attention to this issue. At the same time, a lot of that effort seems to be coming from the last 20 years, so it […]
How many fungus are among us?
I’m currently teaching some introductory biology labs and we’ve begun an overview of the diversity of life on earth, starting with protists and other small organisms- my blog tends to focus on the larger organisms that you can see easily without microscopes, and I think there’s a tendency to prioritize those species over the ones […]
A sustainable rose would smell as sweet
Over the past few weeks, I’ve learned that there are a number of environmental and social concerns around the farming of cut-flowers- there are questions about pesticide and water use, about the impacts on families and communities, about poaching and introduced pests. But there are also quite a few organizations working to improve the conditions […]
Natural born flowers
In my last post I talked about some of the environmental concerns surrounding the cut flower industry, namely pesticides, water use, and the movement of parasites and diseases. While there are many other facets to growing flowers for bouquets, I want to highlight two other issues, both of which I think we can influence: wildflower […]
The smell of pesticides in the morning
I had been a little worried that I wasn’t going to be able to find much research concerning the cut-lower industry, or that, if I did, it would all be about developing new varieties of popular flowers. In fact, I was surprised at the extent of the literature- researchers have been paying attention to multiple […]
Hoping to say it with flowers
When I started thinking about a blog topic for this month, I looked back through the posts from the last few months and noticed that my last four topics have centered on animals. Probably a good idea to show plants a bit more appreciation, and it is February after all- pictures of flowers are pretty […]
Making room for seabirds
Over the last few weeks I’ve described some of the problems facing colonial seabirds around the world (and some of them are pretty serious), but I’ve also pointed out that we are making progress at fighting some of these challenges. Birds in general get a lot of attention from researchers and the public- they are […]