Look who we found on his way to the pond this rainy morning!
Pokémon Go at Clary Gardens!
07-20-2016
COSHOCTON – All the Pokémon Go hype right now is a huge benefit to Clary Gardens. They are receiving large amounts of visitors hearing about the exciting “catches” that can be found throughout the garden property and the garden staff is getting in on the fun.
“We have about a dozen youth that come and work with us at the gardens each summer and they are stoked to come to work each day and find the new Pokémon and perks awaiting them in different areas of the garden,” said Jandi Adams, director at Clary Gardens. “Pokémon Go players have an elaborate 20 acres of terrain they can cover. It’s a shame that there is so much negativity surrounding the game in the media. I will say that it is important for families to find safe places to play, and what a better area than the gardens.”
Adam Alvarez, one of the summer youth workers at the gardens explained that it is very useful to look for Pokémon in historic, well-travelled areas, like cemeteries and community parks.
“It brings a fun aspect to work because almost all the summer workers at the gardens are in on the game – which definitely gives the garden the potential to become a widespread, more well-known area possibly containing stronger Pokémon and rarer finds that are more difficult to acquire,” he said.
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Another Garden Critter
07-20-2016
Good morning gardeners! Check out today's neat little critter found in the gardens!
Black-Eyed Susan
07-19-2016
Rudbeckia
Add a pool of sunshine to the garden with a massed planting of black-eyed Susan. From midsummer, these tough native plants bloom their golden heads off in sun or light shade and mix well with other perennials, annuals, and shrubs. Tall varieties look especially appropriate among shrubs, which in turn provide support. Add black-eyed Susans to wildflower meadows or native plant gardens for a naturalized look. Average soil is sufficient for black-eyed Susans, but it should be able to hold moisture fairly well.
So many Amazonian tree species, won't discover last one for 300 years!
07-15-2016
ScienceDaily, 13 July 2016
In a new study, scientists have compiled data from museums around the world to find how many Amazonian tree species have been described so far. The answer: 11,676. They also estimate that there are another 4,000 species yet to be discovered, and it will take 300 years to find them all. The report includes a checklist of all known Amazonian trees for conservation ecologists to use in their work.
Amazonian forest in the Putumayo basin of Loreto, Peru, was surveyed during a February 2016 rapid inventory by The Field Museum.
Credit: Photo by Nigel Pitman, The Field Museum
There are more different kinds of trees in the Amazon rainforest than anywhere else on earth, but the exact number has long been a mystery. In 2013, scientists estimated that the number of species was around 16,000 -- no one had ever counted them all up, though. In a new paper in Scientific Reports, the same scientists delved into museum collections from around the world to confirm just how many tree species have been recorded in the Amazon so far -- and how many have yet to be discovered.
Nigel Pitman, The Field Museum's Mellon Senior Conservation Ecologist, explains, "Hans ter Steege at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center led an international team of botanists who tallied up the number of species in more than half a million museum specimens collected in the Amazon between 1707 and 2015, and we came away with a list of 11,676 Amazonian tree species. We interpret this to mean that our 2013 estimate of 16,000 species is good, and that about 4,000 of the rarest Amazonian trees remain to be discovered and described."
"Since 1900, between fifty and two hundred new trees have been discovered in the Amazon every year," adds Pitman. "Our analysis suggests that we won't be done discovering new tree species there for three more centuries."
The study relied upon the digitization of museum collections data -- photographs and digital records of the specimens housed in museum collections that are shared worldwide through aggregator sites like IDigBio. "We couldn't have written this paper without digitization efforts," says Pitman. "All of the information we needed was in the same place, so we didn't have to go through every individual museum in the world. We were able to use data not just from The Field Museum, but from museum collections everywhere."
The scientists explain that the checklist could prove an invaluable resource for ecologists studying the Amazonian rainforest. "We're trying to give people tools so they're not just laboring in the dark," says ter Steege. "The checklist gives scientists a better sense of what's actually growing in the Amazon Basin, and that helps conservation efforts."
The project, notes Pitman, is a marriage of centuries-old collections with new technologies that made it possible to share and aggregate all of the collections data. "Botanists at The Field Museum have been collecting and describing Amazonian plant species for over a hundred years," says Pitman. "We have scientists here, like Robin Foster, who have worked on Amazonian botany for decades. This new list is in some ways a culmination of all that work."
Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Field Museum. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
- Hans ter Steege, Rens W. Vaessen, Dairon Cárdenas-López, Daniel Sabatier, Alexandre Antonelli, Sylvia Mota de Oliveira, Nigel C. A. Pitman, Peter Møller Jørgensen, Rafael P. Salomão. The discovery of the Amazonian tree flora with an updated checklist of all known tree taxa. Scientific Reports, 2016; 6: 29549 DOI: 10.1038/srep29549