La Mode Verte
Environmental Awareness Through Media ProductionsArchive for Kew
Great Showing in Kew Village
On Monday (26th March), we showed our film in Kew Village for an event hosted by Greener Upon Thames. The venue, Oliver’s Wholefood Store next to the station, was slightly smaller than our first showing at the UN in Brussels. Around 60 people squeezed into the shop where director Ed Scott-Clarke accompanied Plastic Shores interviewee Roz Savage, as well as Greener Upon Thames director Mike Glazebrook, for a question and answer session after the showing. One of our aims with Plastic Shores is taking the film around smaller venues such as this. Local showings are just as important than larger scale ones and have the potential to have a more direct impact on consumer behaviour. We are now taking a couple of weeks to perfect Plastic Shores before our main launch towards the end of April. More details will follow.
Victorian Plant Collections Reveal New Effect of Global Warming
www.telegraph.co.uk 22nd September 2010
By studying plant specimens as far back as 1848, researchers from the University of East Anglia and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew have discovered a new ecological effect of global warming. Victorian botanists meticulously collecte specimens from around the world and recorded such information as when the flower bloomed. By comparing this data with that of present day, the research team has calculated that for every 1 degree centigrade (1.8 Fahrenheit) the Earth warms plants flower six days earlier. The test species in this study was the Early Spider Orchid (Ophrys sphegodes) but with 2.5 billion plant and animal specimens, dating back as much as 250 years, in natural history collections around the world, this avenue of research has only just begun.
Scientists Delete 100,000s of ‘Duplicates’ from World Species List
www.telegraph.co.uk 20th September 2010
Image sourced from http://www.britannica.com
Scientists from the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew have carried out the most comprehensive assessment ever of the list of flowering plant species in the world. It has taken the research team three years to finish the study and they enlisted the help of almost 200 governments. They concluded that as many as 600,000 species were actually ‘duplicates of already categorised plants’. The mistakes included 790 different entries for the tomato and 600 different names for the oak tree and its varieties. Having multiple entries for any one species is detrimental for scientific research as one entry may contain information another one doesn’t. The full results of the project are to be announced at the end of the year but statistics currently stand at 301,000 accepted species, 480,000 alternative names, and 240,000 left to assess.
