Category: Research
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In the Shadow of Giants: When Grasses Started their Quest for World Domination
The Fraser River Trail that runs along the Fraser River and connects the town of Fraser, CO and Winter Park, CO passes through various habitats, from meadows to suburban paths, and even to dark quiet areas covered by tall conifers. It is a paved and easy trail that i would highly recommend to anyone interested…
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Bamboos Red in Tooth and Claw
The common perception of bamboo has always been somewhat pacifistic, with images of cute pandas intermixed with the culms or images of the beautiful bamboo forests in temperate Asia. But research from the Amazon rainforest seems to show another aspect of this much-loved group of grasses. In the SouthWest Amazon rainforest, a vast area of…
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Cogon Grass in Colorado: Proof that Winter-Hardy and Aggressive Reversions are Possible
Imperata cylindrica (Cogon grass) in the USA exists in two divergent forms. The first is the wild type form, which is considered cold-intolerant, fairly large, very aggressive, and has uniformly green leaves. In contrast, an ornamental variety that is very cold-tolerant has reddish-green leaves and is much shorter than the wild form. It is also…
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How Bamboos Exploited Pandas
Pandas are iconic animals that are well known and beloved around the world. They are bears from the family Ursidae, and are endemic to China. But unlike the other members of the taxon, they subsist mainly on bamboo shoots and leaves, even though their teeth and digestive systems are geared towards a meat-eating (carnivorous) diet….
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Delineating Grassland Evolution Using Phytoliths
I have a strong fascination with the evolution of grasslands, and this recent talk by Dr. Caroline A E Strömberg is pretty much the best and most comprehensive video about that subject. If you are at all a scholar of grasses, then this is one video you should not miss. It is fairly long, but…
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eDNA and Mammoth Steppes: Let’s Hear It for the Forbs!
Forbs is a catch-all term for all herbaceous plants in grasslands that are not graminoids. That is, these are the species that are not in the plant families Poaceae, Cyperaceae, and Juncaceae. The focus of this website is obviously on the graminoid family Poaceae, and grasses rightly have been the main focus of studies on…
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Grass: “Let me help you there, Forest…”
The concept of using biotic resistance by natives to prevent invasives from making inroads into natural areas is nothing new. One of the earliest examples of this is the hypothesis that diversity in either species or function is a way for natural communities to resist encroachment by invasive species. This so-called Elton Hypothesis postulates that…
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Beach Bum: Getting Salty with Bermuda Grass
I was staying at a beachside hotel in southwestern Florida when I noticed a high sprawling grassy area that crept up from the beach and threatened to move into the parking lot. Curious about what type of grass could grow in such a salty environment, I came closer, expecting it to be something like Paspalum…
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An irresistible force meets an immovable object?
I’ve been doing a long running observation on a stand of Imperata cylindrica (Cogon grass) in Florida since 2021, with the cogon grass rapidly overwhelming its competitors as it spread laterally along a roadside. For a history of this series of observations: April 2021Rapid expansion of an invasive grass as viewed using Google StreetView December…
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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…