Commonwealth Journal: New Tool For Identifying Pests of Woody Plants. “The University of Kentucky Department of Entomology has created a new, interactive website to help concerned tree owners identify their insect problems. The ‘Guide to Insect Pests of Woody Plants’ will hopefully be of use to you if you have the pest in hand or if you just have the damage they left behind.”
plants
Wired: The Princess, the Plantfluencers, and the Pink Congo Scam
Wired: The Princess, the Plantfluencers, and the Pink Congo Scam. “Online, plant fraud doesn’t even require getting your hands dirty. Sellers on sites like eBay and Amazon have listed ‘rare’ plants, like the blue Venus flytrap or the strawflower cactus, which do not exist in nature. (The Venus flytrap gets its blue coloring from Photoshop; the cactus’ Xerochrysum flower is not actually in bloom, but affixed with hot glue.) Others, who offer bargain prices for the seeds of rare and difficult plants, have been reported to take the money and send birdseed instead. And then there are sellers who invent their own kinds of magnificent plants, like the pink congo.”
Nursery Management: New free Horticulture Careers Internship Search Tool connects students to practical job experience
Nursery Management: New free Horticulture Careers Internship Search Tool connects students to practical job experience. “On Jan. 30, Seed Your Future announced the launch of its new free online Horticulture Careers Internship Search Tool to help students find internships across the broad diversity of the horticulture profession. This is the newest resource from Seed Your Future, a coalition of more than 200 partners — including horticulture companies, gardening organizations, schools, colleges, universities, public gardens, youth organizations, nonprofit organizations and individual advocates — united in their mission to promote horticulture and careers working with plants.”
University of Washington: Better wildfire and smoke predictions with new vegetation database
University of Washington: Better wildfire and smoke predictions with new vegetation database. “Researchers from the University of Washington and Michigan Technological University have created the first comprehensive database of all the wildfire fuels that have been measured across North America. Called the North American Wildland Fuel Database, the tool incorporates the best available measurements of vegetation in specific locations, and allows fire managers to see where information about fuels is missing altogether.”
Mongabay: New assessment method finds close to one-third of tropical Africa’s plants are potentially facing extinction
Mongabay: New assessment method finds close to one-third of tropical Africa’s plants are potentially facing extinction . “New research finds that nearly one-third — 31.7 percent — of tropical Africa’s vascular plant species might be at risk of going extinct. The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species is the go-to resource for conservation status assessments, but while the majority of vertebrate species have been assessed, we know far less about the conservation status of plants, especially in the tropics.”
Computing: Kew Gardens plans to digitise and release Darwin’s data
Computing: Kew Gardens plans to digitise and release Darwin’s data . “Kew Gardens is planning to implement an integrated collections management system to unify its disparate databases and make their data available to the world. Whilst most think of the sculpted gardens when they think of Kew, and as a plot of land which is home to over 30,000 trees that’s unsurprising, most are unaware that it’s also a centre of scientific research, and home to the world’s most extensive botanic collections.”
CBC: Research, photos of Manitoba tundra open to public
CBC: Research, photos of Manitoba tundra open to public. “An archive of photos and research of plants and animals in Manitoba’s tundra are now available online, providing public access to decades of Churchill, Man., history. Professors from York University in Toronto are in the town 1,000 kilometres north of Winnipeg this week to share the Churchill Community of Knowledge — a digital archive that more than 50 York University students have been putting together since 2011.”
