A new snowdrop discovered from holiday snaps on social media and a “miracle berry” that alters your taste buds are among the plant and fungi species discovered this year.

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is highlighting the top 10 weird and wonderful discoveries from 102 species of plant and eight new fungi found by the institution and its partners in 2019.

The discoveries include species which could help develop new medicines, or become fresh favourites for plant lovers – but many are already at risk of extinction from deforestation, agriculture and energy developments, experts at Kew said.

Protection

Also among the top 10 new finds are an “orchid” found in a waterfall which could be wiped out by a hydroelectric dam, a medicinal fungus growing on bamboo, and an orange bloom named after the wife of the botanist who discovered it.

Dr Martin Cheek, Kew botanist and senior scientist at the Kew science identification and naming department, said: “Discovering and describing new species is a truly exciting and vital scientific endeavour so we can better protect new species before they become extinct.

“It also helps us to understand their potential uses, and how they might provide the solutions to help us tackle some of the critical challenges facing humanity today.

“This year’s selection represents a range of new-to-science plants and fungi that are unique and characterful, yet threatened by human interventions and at risk of becoming extinct soon; something that makes us both concerned and passionate about their protection.”

Zonozono

The top 10 highlights of the discoveries made in the world of plants and fungi this year are:

– A new snowdrop (Galanthus bursanus) from north west Turkey was discovered when a Turkish paediatrician uploaded her holiday photos to Facebook, where the plant was spotted by a Ukrainian snowdrop specialist, Dr Dimitri Zubov.

It has already been assessed as “critically endangered” due to threats from illegal collecting, marble quarrying, climate change and expansion of agricultural land.

– A new species of “miracle-berry” (Synsepalum chimanimani) was discovered in the lowland rainforests of the Chimanimani Mountains on the Mozambique-Zimbabwe border, whose fruits are slightly sweet to taste, but contain a compound called miraculin that blocks taste buds, so when sour foods are eaten, such as limes, they taste sweet.

The new species has been assessed as “endangered” as it is only known in three locations, all of which are under threat from deforestation for agriculture.

– A species from the family known as the “orchids of the falls” (Inversodicraea koukoutamba) was discovered on a waterfall on the Bafing River in Guinea, West Africa.

It is a rubbery seaweed shrub which grows to 20cm tall, but Kew scientists expect it to become globally extinct when construction on a planned hydroelectric project in the area begins next year.

– A medicinal fungus known in China for more than 400 years, “Zhuhongjun”, has been discovered to be a genus as well as a species previously unknown to science, and has now been formally named Rubroshiraia bambusae.

It grows in Yunnan in south west China, forming pink, ball-like fruiting bodies on a species of bamboo.

It is used in traditional medicine for arthritis and infant seizures, but it is also of growing scientific interest due to the presence of hypocrellins, compounds with light-induced anti-tumour, anti-fungal and anti-viral activities and potential for antimicrobial use.

– There were 10 new species of bear’s breeches plants found in tropical Africa, including two showy blue-flowered species of barleria found in Angola: Barleria deserticola and Barleria namba – one of which was refound in 2017, 160 years after it was first collected by explorer Friedrich Welwitsch, and one which was discovered on the previously unexplored Mount Namba.

– A striking bright pink, candy-striped flower from the African violet family (Cyrtandra vittata) was discovered this year in northern New Guinea. The shrub grows in the rainforest and its white berries are thought likely to be dispersed by doves and pigeons. It was collected under permit and was discovered to be a new species when it bloomed in cultivation.

– There were 11 new species of trees and shrubs from the genus Freziera discovered in the Andean forests in South America this year, some of which could have medicinal value or could make conservatory plants because of their attractive glossy leaves, but all have been assessed as threatened with extinction.

– A perennial herb (Costularia cadetii) which grows on the rims of the volcanoes in Reunion in the Indian Ocean was first collected in 1965 but more material was needed and it was only officially named this year. The species is already classified as endangered as it is restricted to a high elevation habitat that puts it at risk from volcanic activity, fire and climate change.

– A vivid orange flower (Gladiolus mariae) was found growing on a table-stone mountain in Kounounkan, in Guinea, and is restricted to two mountains in the area which are among the last to remain unaffected by humans. The finder, Kew scientist Xander van der Burgt, decided to name it after his wife Maria.

– Zonozono, a 20m tall tree in the ylang-ylang family, has been discovered in Tanzania, but with just seven trees known on Earth, it is very rare and has been assessed as endangered due to the low number of individuals, and threats from pole-cutting and an invasive tree species.

This Author

Emily Beament is the PA environment correspondent.

Petrol and diesel cars will be banned from Barbican Estate’s Beech Street as it becomes Britain’s first zero-emission street, the City of London Corporation (CLC) said.

The city is working with Transport for London on plans for the street to just be used by zero-emission vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians by spring 2020.

The measure will be achieved with an 18-month experimental traffic order, CLC said in a statement, which will allow air quality and traffic to be monitored.

Warnings

Emergency vehicles, refuse collection and deliveries will be excepted from the order.

CLC Environment committee chair Jeremy Simons said: “Drastically reducing air pollution requires radical actions, and these plans will help us eliminate toxic air on our streets.”

Petrol and diesel cars will be rerouted using advance warnings and signage on approach to Beech St.

This Author

Benjamin Cooper is a reporter for PA.

Across the country large numbers of winter thrushes, fieldfares and redwings are turning up on lawns as the temperature plummets. These birds are often mistaken for the song thrush, which can be found in gardens all year round, as they look very similar.

Sadly the more familiar song thrush, together with winter visitors fieldfares and redwings are all on the conservation status red list and are globally under threat as numbers have declined dramatically.

Redwings are small thrushes with brown backs, streaked breasts and patches of red under their wings. Their larger cousins, fieldfares, have blue grey hoods, grey brown backs, streaked breasts and a pale grey rump.

Garden Birdwatch

These birds usually spend the winter roaming the countryside in search of berries and other fruit.

Redwings and fieldfares will remain in the UK until around the end of March when they return to Iceland and Scandinavia to nest.

The popular song thrush, is a songbird that can be spotted in our gardens throughout the year and has a brown back and spotted breast. It has a beautiful and loud song and likes to eat snails which it breaks into by smashing them against a stone with a flick of the head.

When the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch began in 1979, the song thrush was the tenth most seen bird in gardens across the country. But from the latest citizen survey results, numbers reveal they have declined by 77 percent over the last 40 years.

Food supply

RSPB Wildlife Advisor Charlotte Ambrose said: “At this point in winter much of the natural food supply will have been used up. So with the weather now turning dramatically for much of the UK, these hungry birds have moved into gardens for food, water and shelter.

“You can help these beautiful visitors get through this cold snap by putting out fruit like apples and pears and planting winter berry plants such as holly. Remember they’ll need water too, so keep your bird bath topped up and ice free.”

Up to half a million people are expected to watch and count their garden birds for this year’s RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch over the last weekend in January 2020. To find out more, click here. 

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from the RSPB. Image: Mike Pennington: Geograph. 

Indigenous youth activists demonstrated outside the COP25 on the first morning of the UN climate conference against Chilean state repression alongside their Mapuche compañeros.

The demonstrators gave speeches in Spanish and English wearing bandannas, patches and bandages over their faces to represent the 200 activists in Chile who have lost an eye because of police rubber bullets.

Read: “UN climate talks: ‘in moral terms… it’s evil!'”

Xicana Niria Alicia said: “We came out to stand in solidarity with our Chilean brothers and sisters, particularly our indigenous relatives out there who have been experiencing massive amounts of police brutality.”

Avoiding scrutiny

The COP25 was moved from Santiago de Chile to Madrid weeks before it was due to begin because of civil unrest, meaning Sebastián Piñera and the Chilean government have avoided scrutiny of their human rights abuses according to the demonstrators, who are determined to refocus the world’s attention on to what has been two centuries of extractivism, colonialism and combustion.

Kevin Brookland of the artivist network said: “This is not about the small metro rise that kicked off a mass social movement. This is about thirty years of a neo-liberal agenda that has devastated our planet and our communities and that same logic is being applied at this COP with proposing emissions trading schemes and market solutions as if they were an effective way to actually deal with the emergency that we are facing as a global community.”

The Mapuche people of Southern Chile make up 10 percent of the country’s populace and they have accused the Chilean government of genocide.

Ximena Painequeo of the Lafkenche territorial identity said: “[We] are being terribly suppressed these days. Even our young people are being left without one of their eyes, they are our brothers and sisters…

“We are here to tell the government and the whole world: Stop looting our ancestral lands. Stop looting all indigenous people in America and in the rest of the world … If you keep looting our planet it will only keep deteriorating.”

Corporate greenwashing

Extinction Rebellion followed with their own demonstration in the afternoon, blocking the road with banners in Russian and English to demand stronger action from world leaders.

They were joined by eight-year-old child activist Licypriya Kangujam as she left the conference building. She asked: “Why should I come here? Why should I speak here? I have to go to my school, I have to read my books, I have to play, I have to study.

“But our leaders have ruined our childhood life and our beautiful future … What I want is not about today or tomorrow but what needs to be done now.”

Demonstrations against government inaction have escalated since the conference began, culminating in a march of nearly half a million people on Friday night along Madrid’s central artery, Paseo de la Castellana, with Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future also targeting corporate greenwashing. 

Greta Thunberg joined her fellow youth strikers in the COP25, wading through a media swarm before giving a press conference: “We have been striking now for over a year and still nothing has happened. The climate crisis is still being ignored by those in power and we cannot go on like this. It is not a sustainable solution that children skip school. We don’t want to continue.”

Renewable resource

China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and India have caused anger amongst some delegates, who have accused them of blocking progress on the talks and ignoring the urgency of the crisis.

There was a strong, almost desperate hope from activists that these negotiations will finally yield some concrete results.

Speaking at the conference, Al Gore said: “We are not facing up to this challenge. The crisis is still getting worse at a rate that exceeds the rate at which we are mobilising solutions but we are gaining momentum and soon we will be gaining on the crisis. The will to act is itself a renewable resource.”

This Author 

Danny Halpin is a reporter for Extinction Rebellion’s Rebel Radio and is studying for his MA in journalism at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a regular contributor for TruePublica and his work has featured in the Journal of Popular Music Education, Lippy Magazine and his website. 

Image: Danny Halpin.

Our world changed forever when ancient civilizations discovered that water could be used as a source of power.

The Greeks and Romans drew water for irrigation, which improved their agricultural productivity. Now, water is a necessity in generating hydropower, extracting fuels and cooling thermal power plants. Water security and energy are essential to human and economic development worldwide.

As the world’s population increases, so too does the competition for these elements. By 2035, the consumption of water and energy resources will increase by nearly 35 percent. Rapid expenditure of water, paired with rising global temperatures, creates more uncertainty surrounding water security. Severe floods and droughts brought on by a lack of water will make it harder to generate electricity from water sources.

Ocean energy

Currently, hydraulic energy makes up 18 percent of the world’s electricity production, and engineers are now studying even more ways to use water to generate power.

If done correctly, these new techniques could drastically reduce emissions and save costs in operation. To keep using water’s natural currents in the future, energy choices made today must be smart and sustainable. 

The world’s energy systems are inseparably linked to water. That is why engineers are working on harnessing the power of ocean energies and undammed river currents. Examples of ocean energies include wave energy, tidal energy, thermal energy and underwater energy created by ocean currents. 

Although the process of capturing ocean energy has not yet reached maturity, it is extremely promising. Converters are able to capture the energy contained in waves by trapping air pockets to drive turbines, using wave motion and even generating energy from wave height differences.

Tides also produce energy captured through tidal-range technologies that use a type of barrage to harvest power created between high and low tide. 

Untapped energy

Ocean salinity also produces energy. Known as “salinity gradient energy,” this type of power arises from different salt concentrations when rivers empty into oceans.

Current demonstration projects utilize pressure retarded osmosis or reverse electrodialysis to experiment with this concept. In pressure osmosis, freshwater flows through a membrane into a tank of saltwater to increase its pressure.

Another promising power source is ocean thermal energy conversion. Temperature differences between cooler deep seawaters and warmer shallow seawaters have the potential to produce incredible amounts of electricity.

Studies estimate that simply harnessing two one-thousandths of the untapped energy of the ocean can provide enough power to satisfy the current worldwide demand. 

Ocean energy demonstrates an impressive amount of potential for energy creation. In reality, we have barely scraped the surface of what the world’s oceans have to offer since the deepest waters remain unexplored.

Although waves and tides are seasonal, they are more predictable and constant than current energy sources like wind and sunlight. Consistency is the key to generating power. 

Hydropower advancements

Pairing water with the power of technology can increase the consistency of this energy source even more. The hydropower industry is currently working on implementing the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to digitise hydropower efforts. This will reduce carbon emissions and save on operation costs.

IIoT technology is generally used to collect and analyze information in real time. These technologies allow machines to communicate autonomously with other instruments to identify trends and provide actionable insights for improvement.

Hydropower operators can use this technology to leverage data and further optimize their power plants.

While pure water is already powering our world, capitalizing on it can be expensive when building new plants. Modular hydropower systems aim to lower construction costs while reducing the impact on the environment. This type of hydropower uses separate components that are constructed off-site and later easily integrated into existing sites. 

Advancements in hydropower and the harnessing of other water resources are serious alternatives for the future of energy worldwide. While engineers and scientists are still developing some processes, proper planning and investment can ensure their full potential is met. 

Solutions for the future of energy depend on a variety of factors, including finances, environment and available technology.

What’s essential is that planners and decision-makers consider existing water constraints and stay informed on how to deal with those issues sustainably. 

This Author

Emily Folk is a conservation and sustainability writer and the editor of Conservation Folks.