Category: Featured

Luigi asks the $64,000 question:

What I want to know is whether all these countries buying up leases have taken climate change into account. Will they end up holding pretty useless pieces of land?

Mappers and modellers, do your stuff.

Tai Haku drops a bombshell:

[The] Eden [Project] is almost exclusively crops – it relates to human/plant interdependence. There were cocoa, cork oak, bamboo, amaranth, coffees and any number of others when I was there. Relatively few “wild” plants.

Anyone else care to comment?

Our mate Danny weighs in on CWRs and protected areas:

Maybe what is required is a more dynamic approach to CWR conservation… A more holistic approach to increasingly mobile target areas.

And yes, he has some details.

back40 has hot news on cool cows:

Cows are hot. Their eponymous rumens run at about 104F due to the furious activity of rumen biota. This means that heat is often a worse problem than cold since it takes energy to stay cool as well as warm, yet they need to eat and so refill the rumen to get energy. The hurrier they go the behinder they get. Shade in summer is as important as wind shelter in winter.

Not a lot of people know that.

Prof. Heywood gives us holiday advice:

In fact, Phoenix theophrasti grows in nine coastal localities in Crete. See here (scroll down to the English text!). That at Moni Preveli, which I have visited several times, is an inlet by a popular tourist beach and you can view the Phoenix populations by pedalo! Very laid-back way of botanising.

Sounds ideal!