It is called "fairy spud" because it produces tubers that you can eat just like potatoes!
A particular species of mining bee depends almost entirely upon this plant!
It can go in a lawn—it will blanket the ground in blossoms in early spring before mowing starts, and die off before summer. The leaves look just like grass. (I think it probably needs fallen leaves for support and moisture though!)
Spicebush (Lindera benzoin) blooming with its tiny clumps of yellow flowers. The leaves and twigs smell lovely, like lemon furniture polish*, the berries are red and beautiful. Whenever I am cutting brush this is one of the shrubs I leave because it’s native here and beautiful and useful.
* It’s often identified as smelling ‘lemony,’ which is broadly correct, but it could be more accurately described as smelling *exactly* like Lemon Pledge furniture polish.
The berries look like this:
and the associated butterfly, Spicebush Swallowtail, looks like this:
Have any experiments started before but continued past 2003? Particularly in the Eastern USA? I’m grabbing at straws for what happened I’d appreciate any direction
Yes, numerous. I would need a state and type of experiment you’re asking about.
To all the digital artist in the Northern east part of the usa ...Save Your Work!!! Weather is going to be rough and nothing worse then losing ones work to a power outage!
Bird identification is so fucked up in a really fun way you can’t understand until you get into it. For example, there is a type of goose called the cackling goose that looks exactly like a Canada goose except smaller and “cuter”. The cackling goose is way, way, more rare in most places than its relatively common cousin, so it’s on tons of birders life lists. Everyone wants to see a cackling (look in any bird ID group to see lots of hopeful people posting petite Canada geese). The two species regularly commingle, so sometimes a flock of those common parking lot birds will have the equivalent of a Pokémon shiny just hanging out in the middle of them.
How ridiculous and fun is that? I can never look at a big group of Canada geese without scrutinizing their ranks for an adorable little extremely rare cutie pie cackling goose. It reminds me a bit of mushroom harvesting minus the risk of death if you get it wrong
"A century of gradual reforestation across the American East and Southeast has kept the region cooler than it otherwise would have become, a new study shows.
The pioneering study of progress shows how the last 25 years of accelerated reforestation around the world might significantly pay off in the second half of the 21st century.
Using a variety of calculative methods and estimations based on satellite and temperature data from weather stations, the authors determined that forests in the eastern United States cool the land surface by 1.8 – 3.6°F annually compared to nearby grasslands and croplands, with the strongest effect seen in summer, when cooling amounts to 3.6 – 9°F.
The younger the forest, the more this cooling effect was detected, with forest trees between 20 and 40 years old offering the coolest temperatures underneath.
“The reforestation has been remarkable and we have shown this has translated into the surrounding air temperature,” Mallory Barnes, an environmental scientist at Indiana University who led the research, told The Guardian.
“Moving forward, we need to think about tree planting not just as a way to absorb carbon dioxide but also the cooling effects in adapting for climate change, to help cities be resilient against these very hot temperatures.”
The cooling of the land surface affected the air near ground level as well, with a stepwise reduction in heat linked to reductions in near-surface air temps.
“Analyses of historical land cover and air temperature trends showed that the cooling benefits of reforestation extend across the landscape,” the authors write. “Locations surrounded by reforestation were up to 1.8°F cooler than neighboring locations that did not undergo land cover change, and areas dominated by regrowing forests were associated with cooling temperature trends in much of the Eastern United States.”
By the 1930s, forest cover loss in the eastern states like the Carolinas and Mississippi had stopped, as the descendants of European settlers moved in greater and greater numbers into cities and marginal agricultural land was abandoned.
The Civilian Conservation Corps undertook large replanting efforts of forests that had been cleared, and this is believed to be what is causing the lower average temperatures observed in the study data.
However, the authors note that other causes, like more sophisticated crop irrigation and increases in airborne pollutants that block incoming sunlight, may have also contributed to the lowering of temperatures over time. They also note that tree planting might not always produce this effect, such as in the boreal zone where increases in trees are linked with increases in humidity that way raise average temperatures."
Recovering our native plants is crucial to fighting climate change~
A lot of plants we keep are invasive and can either take over or leave wastelands when abandoned.
Either way native animals are left with fewer food options
Sometimes, old American books about trees are all "This tree is unshapely, has ragged and irregular growth and has little economic value." but I was wrong to characterize them all as such, because for every capitalist-minded book about the USA's trees that is like "ough we gotta exploit every living thing" there's also a book like this:
The book is called Our Friends the Trees and it was written in the 1930's and this is the VERY FIRST PARAGRAPH, no introduction no nothing, just going all in taking no prisoners from the very first line and it CONTINUES like this for the WHOLE book there is ZERO chill throughout the whole length of the book
Eastern Columbia Building, centre-ville de Los Angeles, construit en 1930, conçu par Claud W. Beelman. crédit : María Prieto Varela. - source Universal sound via Art Deco.