Plants

The eye of the Papuan forest dragon (Hypsilurus dilophus), a sit-and-wait predator, scans the forest for insects and small vertebrates. Photo: Piotr Naskrecki
 
The Papuan forest dragon pictured above is just one of the captivating creatures scientist and photographer Piotr Naskrecki has captured in his new book, Relics: Travels in Nature's Time Machine. Naskrecki traveled the globe in search of creatures and habitats that have persisted, nearly untouched, for hundreds of millions of years. The result is a book packed with stunning images and fascinating information.
 
Relics—and a print of your choice—could be yours. We've teamed up with the University of Chicago Press to give away 10 copies. Click here to enter the giveaway, see more images from the book, and learn more about it. All you have to do is leave a comment and be sure to include a viable email address (it won't show up on the page). Good luck!

California's Cleveland National Forest, at 460,000 acres, accounts for just 0.2 % of the National Forest System's 193-million acres that will be affected by new rules. (Photo: Wikipedia Commons)

Today, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced the department’s intent to issue new planning rules for the nation’s 193-million-acre National Forest System through the release of a Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for the National Forest System Land Management Planning Rule.

In other news, the U.S. Interior Department proposed a plan as well – this time to save the earth’s creatures and ecosystems from the potentially devastating impacts of climate change. Last week, the department posted the first draft of their strategy, “National Fish, Wildlife and Plants Climate Adaptation Plan,” for public review and comment until March 5.

For nearly a decade, a tiny alien menace, a beetle known as the emerald ash borer, has been destroying some of the nation’s most iconic native trees. Now researchers are honing a new method that uses wasps to ferret out these invasive beetles. The technique could help prevent the spreading of the emerald ash borer, as well as benefit other imperiled plants in the future, both in the U.S. and abroad.

Grant Matthews, Flickr Creative Commons

A four-year, 74-million Euro plan to cover the 1,000-foot-tall Eiffel Tower in plants apparently isn’t happening. At least not now.

(Leda Meredith leads a foraging tour in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.)

Leda Meredith, an expert urban forager, stepped off the park’s cement walkway and into a clump of knee-high greenery. “We could get our lunch right here,” she says to a group of want-to-be and practicing harvesters with notebooks and cameras at the ready.

Crews fight Arizona's Wallow Fire at night. Photo: Bill Johnson/NPS
 
Years of fire suppression and today’s warmer, drier climate have spawned a new breed of furiously intense wildfires that can be nearly impossible to put out. In the current issue of Audubon, journalist Daniel Glick delves into the heated topic, and explores whether there’s any way to control these megafires.

Photo: Tom Bruns, University of California, Berkeley

Here’s a riddle: What lives in the rainforest under a tree, not in a pineapple under the sea? What’s absorbent and orange and porous as can be? It’s SpongeBob SquarePants—sort of.

The little yellow cartoon with the square brown bottoms loaned his name to a new mushroom, Spongiforma squarepantsii, discovered in 2010 in Borneo.

Hawaii is home to one of the world’s last dry tropical forests. In their prime, these magnificent ecosystems were bastions of biodiversity. “Thousands of brightly colored, fungi-eating snails slithered through the trees and inched their way through the dark underlying leaf litter. Vast flocks of giant flightless geese squawked across the forest understories; dozens of species of finchlike honeycreepers sipped nectar, gobbled insects, and sought shelter from the heat and hungry eagles, hawks, and owls,” writes Robert Cabin in his new book, Intelligent Tinkering (Island Press, August 2011). For your reading pleasure, we've got an excerpt of Chapter One from the insightful, engaging book...

Photo courtesy of the Kellogg-Hubbard Library

Combine your family’s love of children’s books and nature by participating in the StoryWalk Project, a Vermont-based initiative that turns reading into a physical activity by posting stories page-by-page along popular walking routes such as nature trails. Besides improving reading skills and promoting exercise, StoryWalk’s books can also stimulate environmental awareness, says the project’s founder Anne Ferguson.

What kid doesn't like a good mystery? Of nature's puzzles, deciphering the history of a landscape is one your child can tackle. Whether you're exploring forests, prairies, deserts, coasts, or mountainous terrain, the principles for learning what shaped a place are similar. The key is sharp eyes and a basic understanding of what clues to look for...

[Photo courtesy of SteveHager/Flickr Creative Commons]