Green Group discussion
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Desert plants
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https://phys.org/news/2020-09-ecologi...
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https://phys.org/news/2017-03-fairy-c...
That one is without termites: the below contains termites and a good aerial photo.
https://phys.org/news/2013-03-mysteri...
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Just as importantly, the dazzling red pinwheel painted onto the low ceiling is a representation of the plant itself, not a depiction of a shaman’s visual experiences while tripping on the drug, the scientists argue. The new paper is consequently challenging the prevailing altered states of consciousness model (ASC), which contends that “hallucinogens have influenced the prehistoric making of images in caves and rock shelters,” as the study authors write...
"But in this case, the drawing in question isn’t even ambiguous—the pinwheel painting really does look like the Datura plant, the flowers of which uncoil to reveal a five-pointed, pinwheel-like configuration. Moreover, ethnographic accounts describe how indigenous Californians consumed these plants as a means to enter into a trance state."
https://gizmodo.com/is-this-trippy-ca...
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"James Calaway, executive director of the Australian mining company Ioneer that wants to dig for lithium about 200 miles (320 kilometers) southeast of Reno, said as much as half of the Tiehm's buckwheat population was lost in the unprecedented fall attack at the only place the plant is known to exist.
The species is found on just 10 acres (4 hectares) of land spread across 2 square miles (5 square kilometers) in the remote Silver Peak Range of Esmerelda County. The Fish and Wildlife Service concluded in July there was enough evidence of potential threats to the plant to warrant a full 12-month review of its status.
The agency said Friday the environmental DNA analysis of damaged buckwheat roots, nearby soils and rodent scat conducted by a scientist at Southern Utah University "strongly links mammal herbivory to the widespread damage."
Buckwheat DNA detected in the scat carried genetic signatures matching ground squirrels with a confidence level of 96.9% to 99.8%, according to Jacqualine Grant, an associate biology professor and director of the Museum of Natural History at the university in Cedar City, Utah."
https://phys.org/news/2020-12-rodents...
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This study also looked at the western seaboard, which gains moisture from the sea air.
"Researchers counted over 1.8 billion trees and shrubs in the 1.3 million square kilometer (501,933 square miles) area that covers the western-most portion of the Sahara Desert, the Sahel, and what are known as sub-humid zones of West Africa.
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"The researchers fed the deep learning model thousands of images of various trees to show it what a tree looks like. Then, based on the recognition of tree shapes, the model could automatically identify and map trees over large areas and thousands of images. The model needs only hours what would take thousands of humans several years to achieve."
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/1...
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https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
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https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wildur...
A few photos show that a tree planting effort in Abu Dhabi failed due to irrigation not working. But natural seed in the area started to re-establish plants near the bases of the young dead trees. The shrubs are taking advantage of shelter and shade, also any remaining water and nutrients. A poster pointed out that fungi are decomposing the dead roots and that provides nutrients.
Other posters have shown that simply fencing off the tree nursery stopped grazing animals, so as these deserts are commonly overgrazed, this was enough to allow regrowth.
More suggestions include reshaping the bare soil to create microclimates.
This is a complex issue and all I can suggest is provide more fencing and see what happens naturally.
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"I first observed the cantils in 2008," said Dr. Timothy Gookin, a postdoctoral researcher working in the group of Professor Sarah Assmann. "I initially didn't trust any of the results; I thought it must be an artefact of genetic contamination, perhaps combined with environmental contamination of the water, soil, fertilizer or even the building air supply."
How have cantils eluded scientists for so long? First, cantils are rare; they only develop under certain conditions that cause the plant to delay flowering, such as short day lengths, and cantils only form at the precise point at which the plant begins to flower. In addition, as Dr. Gookin discovered, some popular Arabidopsis strains have genetic mutations that make them incapable of producing cantils at all."
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-scienti...
More information: Gookin, T. E. and Assmann, S. M. (2021). Cantil: a previously unreported organ in wild-type Arabidopsis regulated by FT, ERECTA and heterotrimeric G proteins. Development, 148, dev195545. DOI: 10.1242/dev.195545
Journal information: Development
Provided by The Company of Biologists
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"The Atacama Desert in northern Chile, sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean and Andes Mountains, is the driest place on the planet (excluding the poles). Yet dozens of plants grow there, including grasses, annuals, and perennial shrubs. In addition to limited water, plants in the Atacama must cope with high altitude, low availability of nutrients in the soil, and extremely high radiation from sunlight.
The Chilean research team established an unparalleled "natural laboratory" in the Atacama Desert over a 10-year period, in which they collected and characterized the climate, soil, and plants at 22 sites in different vegetational areas and elevations (every 100 meters of altitude) along the Talabre-Lejía Transect. Measuring a variety of factors, they recorded temperatures that fluctuated more than 50 degrees from day to night, very high radiation levels, soil that was largely sand and lacked nutrients, and minimal rain, with most annual rain falling over a few days.
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""By studying an ecosystem in its natural environment, we were able to identify adaptive genes and molecular processes among species facing a common harsh environment," said Viviana Araus of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Gutierrez' lab and a former postdoctoral associate at NYU's Center for Genomics and Systems Biology.
"Most of the plant species we characterized in this research have not been studied before. As some Atacama plants are closely related to staple crops, including grains, legumes, and potatoes, the candidate genes we identified represent a genetic goldmine to engineer more resilient crops, a necessity given the increased desertification of our planet," said Gutiérrez."
More information: Plant ecological genomics at the limits of life in the Atacama Desert, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2101177118
Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Provided by New York University
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https://phys.org/news/2022-10-secrets...
"Getzin adds that "by forming strongly patterned landscapes of evenly spaced fairy circles, the grasses act as ecosystem engineers and benefit directly from the water resource provided by the vegetation gaps. In fact, we know related self-organized vegetation structures from various other harsh drylands in the world, and in all those cases the plants have no other chance to survive except by growing exactly in such geometrical formations.""
When I drove through the Joshua Tree National Forest in Nevada / Arizona, I saw that the Joshua trees were all evenly and quite widely spaced, because they were growing with as much root space for rainfall capture as they could get. Any closer and the trees would die.
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Guayule is a desert plant which makes biorubber. It needs minimal irrigation and doesn't die during drought. As modern tyres are either plastic, made from oil, or rubber mostly imported from Asia, a sustainable and dependable source of biorubber has great potential for sustainability.
https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-...
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https://www.rte.ie/news/newslens/2023...
""No one expects that this scene is in Saudi Arabia," the 50-year-old retired teacher told AFP as he surveyed the sea of purple stretching as far as the eye can see in the desert around Rafha, close to the Iraqi border.
"The smell and sight refreshes the soul," he said of the plants known in Arabic as wild lavender.
Winter rains brought deadly flooding to parts of western Saudi Arabia late last year, but in northern areas they have brought life to the desert.
Nasser al-Karaani travelled 770 kilometres from the capital Riyadh to see the colourful flowers before they wilt.
"This scene lasts from 15 to 20 days a year, and we come here specifically to enjoy it," the 55-year-old Saudi businessman said."
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10...
"TUCSON, Ariz.—Jerry McHale dug a small hole with a shovel near the base of a Palo Verde tree and placed a cactus a few inches tall in it. The saguaro was just old enough to sprout the needles it needs to keep desert rats and jackrabbits from devouring it. One by one, McHale and a small group of volunteers planted the young cactuses under “nursing plants” that will help them grow, some to nearly 40 feet tall, over the coming centuries at the Tucson Audubon Society’s Mason Center.
Each saguaro planted was a small part of a big project from the conservation and birding group, which is planting 14,000 saguaros over the next two years to help restore the cactuses’ dwindling population. At the same time, they are removing 1,000 acres of an invasive grass that has helped fuel wildfires that have been more destructive across the Sonoran Desert in recent years, particularly to the giant cactuses.
“Saguaros aren’t regenerating and establishing populations in the wild anymore in the last 24 years,” Aya Pickett, a restoration project manager with the Tucson Audubon Society, told the group of volunteers before they set off to plant cactuses. “They really require specific weather conditions. A really good monsoon season. One really good winter. And then another really good monsoon season after that.”
Because of changing weather patterns due to climate change, she said, that hasn’t happened for over two decades. That means when a saguaro dies in the wild, there’s frequently no new one to replace it. "
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"The Western Joshua Tree Conservation Act has passed in California. The act is the first legislation in the state to protect a species from climate change. It prohibits any person or public agency from importing, exporting, removing, owning, buying or selling western Joshua trees or any of their parts, and the legislation requires the Department of Fish and Wildlife, along with Indigenous tribes and the public, to establish a conservation plan for the species."
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"Some home gardeners have begun to use aloe gel as an ingredient in a natural pesticide mixture, along with onions and garlic, but these recipes don't always include the peels. And currently, on a larger, industrial scale, aloe peels are treated as agricultural waste and largely used to create biomass, which can help improve soil quality at aloe farms. The main downside of this approach is that rotting agricultural waste can release methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, contributing to global climate change.
So Bandyopadhyay set out to explore the possibility of recycling the peels to develop a natural pesticide, that on its own, could help farmers in areas where insects can be a major threat, such as regions of Africa, the tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas, and the maize and millet fields in India. The new application as a pesticide could also provide an environmentally friendly alternative for disposing of the peels and create additional revenue streams for aloe vera producers.
"The goal is to recycle this waste in a meaningful way while making aloe production greener and more sustainable," says Bandyopadhyay."
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"A new paper in the Annals of Botany reveals that researchers have found unaltered agave plant species cultivated by several early cultures including the Hohokam people, a large Native American group in the Southwest that existed between 300 and 1500 CE.
Agave plants have been of great economic and social importance in the Americas for at least 9,000 years. Before people cultivated corn, agave plants were one of their main carbohydrate sources. Archaeological research indicates the Hohokam increased agricultural potential by building terraces for agave dry farming.
Agricultural features such as terraces and rock piles were especially characteristic of this culture's farming practices with the increase of dense, aggregated populations."
More information: Wendy C Hodgson, Pre-contact Agave Domesticates—Living Legacies in Arizona's Landscape, Annals of Botany (2023). DOI: 10.1093/aob/mcad113. academic.oup.com/aob/article-l … /10.1093/aob/mcad113
Journal information: Annals of Botany
Provided by Oxford University Press
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"The Negev desert of southern Israel is renowned for its unique rock art. Since at least the third millennium BCE, the hunters, shepherds, and merchants who roamed the Negev have left thousands of carvings (petroglyphs) on the rocks. These figures are mostly cut into desert varnish: a thin black coating on limestone rock, which forms naturally. Many represent animals such as ibexes, goats, horses, donkeys, and domestic camels, but abstract forms also occur.
Now, a study published in Frontiers in Fungal Biology has revealed that the petroglyphs are home to a community of uncommon specialist fungi and lichens. Unfortunately, these species may pose a serious threat to the rock art in the long term.
"We show that these fungi and lichens could significantly contribute to the gradual erosion and damage of the petroglyphs," said Laura Rabbachin, a Ph.D. student at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in Austria, and the study's first author.
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"the diversity and abundance of species on rocks bearing petroglyphs was low in comparison with the soil, which suggests that few species are able to withstand the local extremes of drought and temperature."
More information: Diversity of fungi associated to petroglyph sites in the Negev desert, Israel, and their potential role in bioweathering, Frontiers in Fungal Biology (2024).
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/...
Provided by Frontiers
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https://phys.org/news/2024-12-iconic-...
"New research has found that the punishing summer temperatures and persistent drought conditions in much of Arizona and the Southwest are dealing a double whammy to trees attempting to regulate their own temperature, putting a critical part of the desert ecosystem at risk.
The study, published in October in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at the iconic Fremont cottonwood, which has great ecological importance because of its capacity to support other biota. It is also resilient; the trees can thrive in both the Phoenix summers and the Flagstaff winters.
As heat waves increase, however, a key aspect of the trees' survivability—its mechanism to cool itself through its leaves—is increasingly at risk, said co-author Alexandra Schuessler, a two-time NAU alumna who is now a lab manager at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix. It's not just the heat causing stress on the trees; the other factor is the trees need sufficient water to cool their leaves, and between climate change and dams changing natural watersheds, water is harder to come by."
More information: Bradley C. Posch et al, Intensive leaf cooling promotes tree survival during a record heatwave, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024).
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas...
Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Provided by Northern Arizona University
The brittlebrush is a survivor. The bright silver-grey leaves reflect sunlight, the small leaves allow air circulation and reduce evaporation. Scientists can assess the heat of a previous year by measuring the isotopes in shed leaves, as the plants can close the stomata, or cells which breathe out moisture, to keep all but the smallest molecules inside the leaf.
https://phys.org/news/2020-07-temps-s...
More information: Multidecadal records of intrinsic water-use efficiency in the desert shrub Encelia farinosa reveal strong responses to climate change, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020).
www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.200...