pine in Biological News

UBC discovery unlocks tree genetics, gives new hope for pine beetle defense

UBC researchers have discovered some of the genetic secrets that enable pine and spruce trees to fight off pests and disease, uncovering critical new information about forests natural defense systems. Assoc. Prof. Joerg Bohlmann says this genetic analysis will allow forest stewardship programs ...

Minister Lunn to attend Union of BC Municipalities Pine Beetle Conference

This release is available in French . Vancouver, B.C. - On Sept. 24, 2007, the Honourable Gary Lunn, Minister, Natural Resources will speak at the UBCM Pine Beetle Conference and will announce the delivery of funded activities under the Mountain Pine Beetle Program to help affected communit...

Mountain pine beetle: Canada's new government delivers

This release is also available in French . PRINCE GEORGE, B.C. Speaking on behalf of the Honourable Gary Lunn, Minister of Natural Resources, Dick Harris, Member of Parliament for CaribooPrince George, today announced that Canadas New Governments Mountain Pine Beetle Program will deliver m...

Canada's new government invests $200M in the fight against the mountain pine beetle

The Government of Canada today announced measures to fight the mountain pine beetle and address its impacts on communities and forests in British Columbia. The Federal Mountain Pine Beetle Program will provide $200 million to minimize the consequences of the beetle infestation and assist in efforts...

Study shows pine bark naturally decreases severe chronic venous insufficiency

Recent findings published in the journal of Clinical and Applied Thrombosis/Hematosis show a significant symptom reduction of chronic venous insufficiency (CVI) in patients after supplementing with Pycnogenol® (pic-noj-en-all), an antioxidant plant extract from the bark of the French maritime pine ...

Natural pine bark extract relieves muscle cramp and pain in athletes and diabetics

A study published in this month's issue of Angiology shows that supplementation with the pine bark extract Pycnogenol® (pic-noj-en-all) improves blood flow to the muscles which speeds recovery after physical exercise. The study of 113 participants demonstrated that Pycnogenol significantly reduces ...

Underlying cause of massive pinyon pine die-off revealed

The high heat that accompanied the recent drought was the underlying cause of death for millions of pinyon pines throughout the Southwest, according to new research. The resulting landscape change will affect the ecosystem for decades. Hotter temperatures coupled with drought are the type of even...

Alien woodwasp, threat to US pine trees, found in N.Y.

Despite dozens of interceptions at U.S. ports, a public enemy has infiltrated the nation's borders. Taken captive in Fulton County, N.Y., and identified by a Cornell University expert, the adult female alien is the only one of its kind ever discovered in the eastern United States. The discovery o...

Noise pollution negatively affects woodland bird communities, says CU-Boulder study

... their vocalizations were in the same range as the compressor noise and inhibited communication. Since scrub jays frequently carry, eat and cache pine nuts and disperse them throughout Southwest woodland areas, a decrease in scrub jays in such areas could result in the decreased establishment of piny...

Wolf reintroduction proposed in Scottish Highland test case

...arrying capacity of the land, and have serious consequences on native Scots pine and birch regeneration. In Yellowstone National Park in the U.S., the re...covery. Researchers believe that areas in Scotland now dominated by pure pine trees were once a diverse mixture of mixed pine, birch forest, abundant ald...

Nitrogen research shows how some plants invade, take over others

...nd and forest species, including the Eastern white pine ( Pinus strobus ), a species that is rapidly invad...esota prairies. Over time they discovered that the pine had accrued nearly twice as much biomass as the ne... species. "The higher productivity of the white pine is caused by an increased biomass nitrogen pool th...

Working to conserve endangered 'Playboy' bunnies

...d. UCF Assistant Professor Eric Hoffman and Philip Hughes, an endangered species biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) in Big pine Key, landed a grant to study the bunnies. Tursi joined the team and is conducting fieldwork this summer in the Everglades and Florida Keys. The USFWS ...

Changing climate likely to make 'super weed' even more powerful

... and its enhanced effects against the native species of Phragmites , which is becoming increasingly endangered in the United States. Walnut trees, pine trees, ferns and sunflowers are among the plants that release harmful chemicals to prevent other plants from growing too close to them. However, P...

University of Florida study provides insight into evolution of first flowers

...one-like structures instead of flowers and include pine trees, sago palms and ginkgos. Gymnosperms first a... modified to make the first flower, Soltis said. A pine tree produces pine cones that are either male or female, unlike flowe...

American Chemical Society's weekly PressPac -- April 29, 2009

...n smoke from forest fires that often sweep through huge stands of Ponderosa pine in the western United States and Canada. Their discovery of these mutagens ...curring mutagens that are produced by trees and other plants. Ponderosa pine trees, the researchers note, often grow in droughty areas and in forests su...

Potentially harmful chemicals found in forest fire smoke

... and animals, including humans. Alkaloids also have medicinal value (caffeine and nicotine, for example, are well-known alkaloids that aren't found in pine trees). A large percentage of the alkaloids were those that carry biologically useful nitrogen through atmospheric, terrestrial and aquatic enviro...

4,000-year-old coral beds among world's oldest living things, prof says

...e age of the coral would rank them among the oldest living creatures in continuous existence, Roark adds. Scientists know that some of the bristlecone pine trees in Northern California are also more than 4,000 years old. It was previously believed that such coral beds were no more than a few hundred yea...

UK robot sub searches for signs of melting 60 km into an Antarctic ice shelf cavity

...n Antarctic glacier. Autosub has been exploring pine Island Glacier, a floating extension of the West A...een thinning and accelerating over recent decades. pine Island Glacier is in the Amundsen Sea, part of the...rcher on the project, Stan Jacobs, is studying the pine Island Glacier with International Polar Year (IPY)...

Danger lurks underground for oak seedlings

...ue University researcher Robert Swihart found that pine voles, small rodents that live underground, prefer...eat crash in oak availability." Swihart offered pine voles a selection of tree roots to eat in the labo...going on below the ground," Swihart said. "We know pine voles can do a lot of damage in apple orchards, bu...

Plants take a hike as temperatures rise

...nce 1983 and recording what plants were in flower. The 5-mile hike starts in desert scrub vegetation and climbs 4158 feet (1200 meters), ending in pine forest. Bertelsen has completed 1,206 round-trip hikes and recorded data along the trail for nearly 600 plant species, he said in an e-mail. Lead...

Landscape-scale treatment promising for slowing beetle spread

... Mountain pine beetles devastating lodgepole pine stands across the West might best be kept in check...e flakes gave significant protection from mountain pine beetles when applied to low to moderate beetle pop...

Biologist enhances use of bioinformatic tools and achieves precision in genetic annotation

...comparison of sequences: you can take a gene of a pine tree and send it to the database to see what it is...database has identified, none are like that of the pine except a mouse gene, but in a minimal part. The to...his did not mean the mouse gene is the same as the pine gene, simply that the two had a small part that wa...

American Chemical Society's Weekly PressPac -- Dec. 17, 2008

... nightmare pale in comparison killing millions of pine trees, according to an scheduled for the December ...le, which is decimating the certain populations of pine trees, has led chemists to develop new, more effe...itor Rachel Petkewich points out that the mountain pine beetle has killed millions of acres of...

Women double fruit, veggie intake with switch to Mediterranean diet plan

...atty acid (MUFA), such as olive or hazelnut oil, avocado and macadamia nuts Limits on fats that are low in MUFA, such as corn oil, margarine, tahini, pine nuts and sesame seeds. One or more servings a day of dark green vegetables, such as broccoli, peas and spinach At least one exchange per day of garl...

Study on wildlife corridors shows how they work over time

...e strange looking "patches" cleared out of the surrounding forest. No, they're not crop circles carved by aliens. They're actually budding longleaf pine forest ecosystems. Biologists at Washington University in St. Louis and their collaborators at North Carolina State University, the University of Flo...

AGU journal highlights -- Oct. 16, 2008

...ees above freezing and drives rapid melting of the floating terminus of the pine Island Glacier. To learn more, Thoma et al. model ocean circulation in the ...arly 1990s coincides with a period of observed thinning and acceleration of pine Island Glacier, suggesting that CDW fluctuations may be driving the observe...

Cross kingdom conflicts on a beetle's back

...pone that ultimately results in the destruction of pine forests. In addition, they've identified the speci...aracters and props. Setting: The interior of a pine tree. Enter the protagonist: The pine beetle, boring its way through the bark, a five mi...

Wielding microbe against microbe, beetle defends its food source

... MADISON -- As the southern pine beetle moves through the forest boring tunnels ins... Science , a team of researchers reports that the pine beetle harnesses a second microorganism a bacteri... as a defense. Beyond the leaf-cutting ants and pine beetles, one other example of this type of relatio...

Entomological Society of America names new Fellows for 2008

...s from scientific investigations. Most of the projects in KEL have had an entomological underpinning, e.g., integrated pest management of the southern pine beetle, landscape ecology of feral Africanized honey bees, risk-rating post-oak savanna landscapes for fire ants, etc. John G. Hildebrand earned ...

Novel fungus helps beetles to digest hard wood

...o wood-eating insects. To measure the degree of change in the lignin, they first fed pin oak wood to Asian longhorned beetles. Next they fed ponderosa pine wood to the Pacific dampwood termite, an insect that typically eats only dead wood. Chemical analyses of feces from the two bugs indicated that th...

ESA to feature wide range of UW-Madison presentations

...to blame, but forest ecologists Jordan Muss and David Mladenoff think another answer may lie in the treetops. Though historically dominated by spruce, pine and other evergreens, the peninsula's forests today are mostly composed of deciduous trees. So, the pair hypothesized, when evergreens were abundant, ...

US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute announces new genome sequencing projects

...that the once daunting genome size of the Loblolly pine (Pinus taeda)over 21 billion basesis now becoming tractable. Loblolly pine is the most commonly planted tree species in Ameri...targeted effort to understand the structure of the pine genome. Led by Daniel Peterson of Mississippi Sta...

From Canada to the Caribbean: Tree leaves control their own temperature, Penn study reveals

...Penn, said. "They are endothermic mammals like us ,and they generate their own heat. However, to think that a black spruce in Canada and a Caribbean pine in Puerto Rico have the same average leaf temperature is quite astonishing, particularly since trees are most definitely not endothermic. Our researc...

Complex dynamics underlie bark beetle eruptions

...oScience. Bark beetle epidemics have become more extensive and frequent in recent years as winter temperatures have risen, and an eruption of mountain pine beetles is currently devastating lodgepole pines throughout the mountainous West. The article, by Kenneth F. Raffa of the University of Wisconsin at ...

Reforestation using exotic plants can disturb the fertility of tropical soils

...pical and mediterranean zones particularly harshly, a range of reforestation programmes using rapid-growing forest species (such as eucalyptus, exotic pine or Australian acacias) was undertaken from the mid 1970s. Establishment of bacterial and mycorrhizal symbioses provides these trees with the adap...

U-M scientists remove thousands of aspens to glimpse forest's future

... time machine that allows scientists to measure future carbon uptake now. "We're simply accelerating the natural process of succession to allow the pine and the hemlock and the oak to come up and take their position in the canopy a little faster than they otherwise would, so that we can address the que...

Pioneering landscape-scale research releases first findings

... the preliminary findings of 23 scientists involved in one of the first landscape-scale experiments on how forest management affects western Ponderosa pine ecosystems. The Blacks Mountain Interdisciplinary Research team includes U.S. Forest Service, Humboldt State University, Oregon State University, U...

World's oldest living tree discovered in Sweden

...ing 9,550 years have the same genetic material. The actual has been tested by carbon-14 dating at a laboratory in Miami, Florida, USA. Previously, pine trees in North America have been cited as the oldest at 4,000 to 5,000 years old. In the Swedish mountains, from Lapland in the North to Dalarna i...

Mechanisms of plant-fungi symbiosis characterized by DOE Joint Genome Institute

... fungi. These insights will lead to bolstered biomass productivity and improved forests." Laccaria bicolor occurs frequently in the birch, fir, and pine forests of North America and is a common symbiont of Populus, the poplar tree whose genome was determined by the JGI in 2006 The analysis of the 65-m...

March GEOLOGY and GSA TODAY media highlights

...The Late Quaternary context for recent thinning of pine Island, Smith, and Pope Glaciers Joanne Johnso...t. The ages indicate the mean rates of thinning of pine Island, Smith, and Pope Glaciers since 14.5 thousa...nitude slower than the average rate of thinning of pine Island Glacier (1.6 meters per year) seen in satel...