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Heteropogon contortus: Black spear or drill bit?
When I was visiting Cape Coral, FL, USA last year, I happened upon a very distinctive grass species that had an inflorescence that looked like drill points. Unfortunately, I did not have my camera with me, and the pics I took with my phone were too shabby to be used in the blog. I visited…
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Ultra-low GI Rice for Diabetics
I’ve been reading stories about how eating rice (Oryza sativa) can cause diabetes, even though there is some controversy because the cases of diabetes in rice-eating countries was low in the past, and only shot up once meat eating became more prevalent in such countries. Nevertheless, such fears affected the lives of many people who…
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Hesperostipa: Hiding in the Garden of the Gods
A visit to the Garden of The Gods in Colorado Springs in Colorado, in 2023 was relatively uneventful, until I met a stand with critters that brought curling to a whole new level. The Garden of the Gods itself is gorgeous, with towering red rocks jutting out majestically from the earth. Trails wound in and…
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Creating new grasslands from saline deserts
The news is replete with stories about how grasslands are being destroyed through misplaced afforestation efforts, or through development into agricultural land and suburbs, so this news caught my eye. At a time when climate change and population growth have hastened the impetus to secure food supplies, countries are always looking into how to turn…
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Grasslands accurately track climate change effects instantaneously in real time
The ability to track changes in the biotic environment due to climate change is crucial in order to better understand, predict, and plan mitigation strategies against it. Unfortunately, previous studies on forests and various types of ecosystems have proven somewhat uninformative, with conflicting results being obtained, or with the resulting effects lagging behind the changes….
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Muhlenbergia reverchonii: Going native ain’t bad at all
The Florida community I live in has an HOA that mandates that all landscape plants be native to the region. This means that all the colorful and robust ornamental imports that people would normally gravitate to are off limits to homeowners. In some ways, this might have been a negative, given that one cannot select…