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The Corpse Flower and the Honeysuckle

By Eric Dinerstein / On July 23rd, 2013
Considering the lines stretching around the block ten years ago to witness one of nature’s masterpieces, you might want to arrive early when the National Botanic Garden opens its doors. Trained botanists, tropical ecologists, and naturalists must queue patiently alongside curious visitors from Toledo. All eagerly await a chance to pay homage to the world’s largest flowering plant, the titan arum, now opening (literally) at the Garden. This floral extravaganza will likely run a few more days before Amorphophallus titanum returns to normal life and goes out of bloom.
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#ForewordFriday: Get Connected Edition

By Admin / On June 28th, 2013
If you think you understand wildlife, imagine trekking 7,600 miles in a panther’s footprints. John Davis did while spending 10 months hiking, biking, and paddling from the tip of Florida to Quebec, to better understand what it would take to establish an eastern wildlife corridor or “Wildway™”—a connected network of protected lands, minimal roads and development, and wildlife crossings where roads can be safely traversed by wildlife.
Photo credit: Flock/bandada by Flickr.com user Rafael Edwards

Confessions of an Ecoporn Addict

By Charles C. Chester / On June 26th, 2013
I’m on a site tour, standing with a group of dedicated conservation advocates in a field just outside of Troy, Montana. It’s a truly unimpressive place. A nondescript forested ridge lies in the far distance, a couple of well-kept houses and not-so-well-kept shacks are strewn about in the near distance, I look down to see some nondescript scrub under our feet—and then there’s the rural highway behind me.
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Rarities Conservation: Eric Dinerstein Calls for "A marriage of science, political will, and compassion"

By Admin / On March 6th, 2013
Recently, on HuffingtonPost Green, author Eric Dinerstein voiced his thoughts on what it will really take to conserve rare species worldwide: Biologists assert that we are entering the sixth great extinction spasm in the history of our planet. Only this conservation crisis is different in one major way: it is the only one of the five previous events that has been attributed to humans.

Conservation Efforts for the Rare Lakela’s Mint, Dicerandra immaculata

By Cheryl L. Peterson / On June 4th, 2012
This unique member of the mint family (Lamiaceae) is found only in Indian River and St. Lucie County.  It is a short-lived perennial with showy pink flowers that bloom in the fall that are pollinated by bees.  Lakela’s Mint is one of six species of Dicerandra, each of which are endemic to only Florida and have their own unique minty aroma arising from a particular mixture of essential oils that are produced in glandular capsules on their leaf surfaces.
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Tagging Lemons

By Kennedy Warne / On June 28th, 2011
The role of mangroves as vital nursery habitat for fish is nowhere more evident than in the tiny island of Bimini, off the coast of Florida. Female lemon sharks come to the sheltered lagoon waters to give birth, and the pups live amongst the tangled roots of mangroves, safe from the attention of predators, until they are about three feet long and have a better chance of survival in the open sea. A long-term research program in Bimini is revealing just how important mangroves are in the lives of these sharks, and I turned up right in the middle of the annual population census.

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