Marginal habitats, previously thought to be subsets of the rain forest, have distinct evolutionary paths, challenging our understanding of the Atlantic Forest's diversity.
Author - Fi Gennu
Fi Gennu
Clonal Plants Use Smart Connections to Boost Resistance Against Hungry Insects
Plants that can reproduce by cloning themselves can share resources and signals to resist herbivores. Clones can change the structure of their leaves according to herbivore stress through the connections between them.
The plant that has a nectar menu to prevent unwanted visitors from interfering with pollination
A South American liana creates two different nectars for visitors. A new study finds out why.
Botanists find out why Yellow Rattle is so good at robbing so many different plants of their nutrients
Herbivores often specialise in the plants they persecute, but European Yellow Rattle can tackle many different species and steal their goodies.
Purple Moor Grass prevents Oaks from getting help finding nutrients
Molinia caerulea out-wrestles Quercus petraea in the battle for better ectomycorrhizal colonization.
The travel of Costa Rican palms revealed by their genetic footprints
Genetic analysis of a popular Costa Rican palm suggests that its genetic diversity could suffer from human action.
Success tastes like something else for a high-altitude pitcher plant
Hunting at high altitude, where the insects are few, can be difficult. Quite a few pitcher plants prefer to wait for a delivery.
What lies beneath? Botanists find a disconnection between how plants behave above and below ground.
Do plants invest more in a live-fast and die-young strategy, or take it slow and steady? Botanists have found that the appearance above the ground might not reflect what's happening in the roots.
Missing seed data from the tropics could be harming conservation efforts
Visscher and colleagues propose that global analyses of seed traits with evidence for geographical variation prioritize the generation of new data from tropical regions as well as multi-lingual searches to fill...
How does environment affect biodiversity? Did Humboldt get it right?
Modern botanists have revisited sites examined by Alexander von Humboldt. Have modern advances made the German polymath's work irrelevant?
There’s more to tree spines than first thought
Analysis of 31 tropical woody species with spines on their trunk has uncovered new explanations for the presence of spines on trees.
Botanists uncover the cost of cloning
If a plant wants to produce a clone of itself, then it's usually best to keep the new shoots close.
How does a plant vary across its range?
A French-US team studied whether Arabidopsis in its natural range varies by latitude or from a core to the periphery.
Botanists find the effects of ancient climates in the modern genomes of two closely related oak species
Botanists examined the genomes of two species, Quercus acutissima and Q. chenii, to see if changes in the climate three million years ago affected how they hybridised.
