Latest news with #grasslands
The Guardian
3 days ago
- General
- The Guardian
Country diary: Common milkwort looks light enough to take flight
I glimpse a lilac in the green. A hushed colour that suits the early hour. This common milkwort amid the grass is delicate and slight. The flower has an unusual structure, with an outer set of green sepals and an inner set of wing-like purple ones enclosing the tubular fused petals. The effect is intricate and poised, as if the bloom has landed for a moment in the grass but is equally capable of taking flight. Still holding the morning's dew, it is ephemeral, light. The blooms can also be found in blue, pink or white – leading to another of the plant's names, 'four sisters', for the four possible colours – but here it is a pale purple accent in the green. A number of its other common names reveal a past use in Christian processions – 'rogation flower,' 'cross flower', 'Christ's herb'. Then it was picked for garlands, but today it is better left where it is. While locally frequent and widespread in grasslands, particularly those with chalky soils, and in terrains including cliffs and rock outcrops, verges and alkaline-to-neutral fens, this 'common' milkwort has become rarer as agricultural intensification has reduced and degraded its habitats. As the sun strengthens, the complexion of the grass changes and a spill of yellow dominates. The flowers of the silverweed beam gold up through frosted leaves. Scattered buttercups glow in all directions, while the sunlight coaxes the grass itself into a more fiery palette. There is a temptation to look away, drawn by the brighter shades, yet the milkwort maintains its own attraction. The wing-like inner sepals act as flags, advertising the flower to pollinators, while the front petal serves as a landing platform. It takes a degree of strength to open this flower to reach the pollen and nectar within, giving bees an advantage over other pollinators. While such detail may be missed from human height, the flower still draws, and rewards, the human eye. All too easy to walk past, this quiet treasure in the grass is a feat of daedal elegance. Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount
Irish Times
22-05-2025
- Science
- Irish Times
What do changing rainfall patterns mean for the world's nourishing grasslands?
Grasslands are more than grass. Meadows (mown) and pastures (grazed) supporting orchids, daisies and the edgily named devil's-bit scabious are looking at their best right now. Less intensively managed or semi-natural grasslands include Ireland's most diverse ecosystem in the Burren and support populations of many species of rare and beautiful insects and birds. Visiting a gorgeous bit of grassland near you has never been easier with the launch of The Grasslands Trail , including 27 public and private sites, many of which are publicly accessible. More than 40 per cent of the world's terrestrial surface, and 60 per cent of Ireland, is covered by grasslands. But the word 'grassland' doesn't do justice to the massive diversity of different kinds of grass-dominated ecosystems. Grasslands range from the sparse and spiky deserts of Australia's red centre, supporting huge flocks of budgerigars, to the lush green rain-fed grasslands of Ireland. A recent study of grassland responses to rainfall published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows the global importance of what every farmer in Ireland going through this spell of dry weather knows, rain is critical to grassland productivity. READ MORE The study also shows the response of grassland productivity to rainfall changes depending on whether the critical nutrients of nitrogen and phosphorus are added. Adding both nitrogen and phosphorus to a grassland boosts productivity across the whole rainfall gradient from deserts to the soggy west coast of Ireland. In a wet climate such as ours, adding critical nutrients means the grasses that rapidly use those nutrients, together with the available water, can grow quickly and dominate. This explains the different kinds of grasslands we find here. Burren flowers. Photograph: Burren Ecotourism Network Irish grasslands range from the fertiliser-dependent monocultures of a single-pasture grass species, perennial rye grass, to the massively diverse Burren grasslands, which support more than 1,000 plant species, three-quarters of all the plant species in Ireland. This grassland diversity gradient is governed by how naturally fertile the soil is and the type and quantity of nutrients added through chemical or organic fertilisers. The higher the nutrients in the soil, the fewer species of plants are found in a grassland. This has knock-on effects for the animals that use grasslands for food and nesting. The recent launch of the butterfly atlas of Ireland shows there are ongoing precipitous declines in the abundances and distributions of our most common butterfly species. Many butterfly species are dependent on a diversity of grassland plants to support the needs of caterpillars for the right kinds of leaves and adult butterflies for nectar from flowers. Grasslands have supported human civilisation for millenniums. Breakfast porridge, our daily bread and the rice that sustains more than half of the world's population are all bred from grasses that naturally occurred in the wild. Wild relatives of these cultivated grasses are still a critical resource for providing additional genetic material that is used to breed new cultivars, adapted to our changing climate and soils. Grasslands underpin Ireland's livestock industry and the production of meat and milk. Permanent, unploughed grasslands provide carbon removal services by locking carbon from the atmosphere away in soils, and the grasslands of the Shannon Callows provide space for overflowing rivers to spread, saving downstream towns and cities from flooding. Flower-rich grasslands like the dunes in Derrynane or the winter-grazed pastures of the Burren support important tourism industries and, if managed sustainably, can jointly benefit local economies and biodiversity. A changing climate will disrupt the pattern of rainfall across the country, changing when and how the grass grows. Reducing the emission of fossil fuels and methane from livestock into the atmosphere will reduce the impacts of climate change worldwide and here in Ireland. However, a better understanding of how rainfall and nutrients together affect grass production will be critical to adapting to new conditions for farming and conservation over the next decades. The global study of grasslands, which included the Burren was funded by the US National Science Foundation, an agency that is facing extreme cuts in funding for work on biodiversity and climate. Ireland and Europe will need to step up research efforts to fill this gap in understanding how grasslands can be managed under an uncertain future climate. Yvonne Buckley is professor of zoology at Trinity College Dublin and co-director of the Climate + Co-Centre for Climate, Biodiversity and Water and director of AIB Trinity Climate Hub
New York Times
08-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Trump Officials Ask Court to End Protections for a Strutting, Showy Bird
The Trump administration has moved to end federal protections for the lesser prairie chicken, a showy grouse with the misfortune of inhabiting southern and central grasslands long sought-after for agriculture and energy development. In a court filing on Wednesday, officials said the Fish and Wildlife Service had erred in a Biden-era decision that placed the bird on the endangered species list. It's the latest in a blur of actions by the White House seeking to weaken or eliminate environmental regulations that constrain President Trump's 'drill, baby, drill' agenda. And it's the latest twist for a species whose fate has been fought over for three decades. Lesser prairie chickens — known for the males' quirky courtship displays of stamping, fanning their tail feathers and 'flutter jumping' — have declined from historic estimates of hundreds of thousands or even millions to only about 30,000 today. Habitat loss is the main culprit. In the filing, in United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, officials said they expected to re-evaluate the bird's status by Nov. 30, 2026. Although the species would lack federal protections under the Endangered Species Act in the interim, the motion stated that 'at least sixteen different conservation efforts and programs administered by state, federal, and private entities exist that benefit the lesser prairie chicken.' But conservationists said the Fish and Wildlife Service would be under no obligation to reconsider the species on that timeline and predicted that they would have to sue to make it happen. 'The Trump administration is again capitulating to the fossil fuel industry, ignoring sound science and common sense, and dooming an imperiled species to extinction,' Jason Rylander, a lawyer with the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. 'Removing Endangered Species Act protections is a purely political act that won't stand up in court,' he continued. His group has intervened in the case. As far back as 1998, federal wildlife officials found that the lesser prairie chicken merited protection, but initially said other species were a higher priority. Later, the bird bounced on and then off the list of threatened and endangered species, caught up in lawsuits. In 2022, under President Biden, lesser prairie chickens were again protected. That decision divided the species into two distinct populations, categorizing the southern one (in eastern New Mexico and Southwest Texas) as endangered and the northern one (in central and western Kansas, central Oklahoma and the northeast panhandle of Texas) as threatened, a less imperiled finding that still affords some protections. The petroleum and ranching industries sued in 2023, as did the states of Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma. Now the Trump Administration is arguing that the Fish and Wildlife Service was mistaken in assessing the species as distinct populations, and that doing so 'taints the very foundation' of the decision to list it. The leading global scientific authority on the status of species, the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List, classifies the lesser prairie chicken as vulnerable, akin to the U.S. listing of threatened. Mr. Rylander with the Center for Biological Diversity said he planned to file an opposition to the federal motion in the coming days. The fight over the lesser prairie chicken is taking place as scientists warn that the planet is facing levels of biodiversity loss that are unprecedented in human history. Temperate grasslands are among the world's most imperiled ecosystems.
