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Pebble Go
usernm: engaged pswd: learning

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instant access to thousands of great kids books.

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Instantly access 40,000 high-quality books for kids

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The leading digital library for kids offering unlimited access to 40,000 of the best children's books of all time. Sign up for a free 30 day trial to instantly access high-quality online books for kids, ebooks, audio books, quizzes, videos, and more.

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NY Botanical Garden Article

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instant access to thousands of great kids books.

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Instantly access 40,000 high-quality books for kids

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The leading digital library for kids offering unlimited access to 40,000 of the best children's books of all time. Sign up for a free 30 day trial to instantly access high-quality online books for kids, ebooks, audio books, quizzes, videos, and more.

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What is a Plant? All About Plants for Kids - FreeSchool

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You Tube video of the text being read aloud

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National Geographic: Seed to Plant    by: Kristin Baird Rattini

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Problem: People don't know how to grow gardens but they could be helpful to communities.
Action: Design a garden and a way to share it with others.

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Whether it's the shrinking of glaciers, animals being forced to relocate, ice on rivers breaking up at a much more rapid pace or trees flowering sooner, the dramatic effects of climate change are being seen all across the globe. Scientists have predicted that global temperatures will keep on creeping upwards for the next several decades, with the greenhouse gases produced as a result of human activity.

As well as finding ways to reduce our carbon footprint, we can take the fight to climate change even further by looking at how we tend to our urban gardens. Here's how:

Start growing your own vegetables

Our personal outdoor spaces are used by the ambitious gardeners among us to replace quite a bit of food that's purchased. This in turn reduces your carbon footprint thanks to several factors, including the time it takes to get your food to your plate being cut considerably. It's estimated that the average distance your food travels before it's consumed is a staggering 1,500 miles, meaning that transportation of the goods is burning fossil fuels.

Choose to grow your own vegetables, whether that is by planting some seed potatoes or enhancing your garden with some cabbage plants, and you'll also know that your food is free of chemicals. You can avoid unnecessary packaging as well, not to mention save money when it comes to your weekly food shop.

Introduce more and more plants into your garden

Domestic gardens can act as air-conditioning systems around cities. Did you know that the shelter of trees and hedges can act as insulation in the winter to help bring down energy consumption and heating costs? Place your evergreen shrubs and bushes carefully around your property to reduce the speed of the air movement reaching your building. However, make sure you don't create any unwanted wind tunnels directed towards your house.

As they provide shade, vegetation can also offer aerial cooling throughout the summer months. It's predicted that if we increased our vegetated surfaces in urban areas by as little as 10 per cent then we could help control the summer air temperatures that climate change is bringing. This would also help reduce CO2 emissions.

Take note too that every plant is important for improving air quality, due to them absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen. With vehicle usage ever increasing, plants are playing a vital part in offsetting some of the emissions automobiles are releasing.

Take up composting

One key way to fight back against climate change is with eco-gardening. Therefore, adding compost to your soil can provide crucial nutrients and microorganisms to the earth. If you want to cut costs, you can make your own compost using kitchen scraps, so long as it's not meat or fish. This will also reduce the waste transported to landfill.

Greenhous gas emissions, especially methane, can be reduced through composting. This is because they lower the need to use chemical fertilisers and pesticides. It also helps soils hold any carbon dioxide and improves tilth and workability of soils-enabling the soil to either resist or assist root growth depending on the scenario. However, it's important to carefully maintain your composting or it may reverse the desired effect.

Consider your water use

It could soon become the standard to expect a hot and dry summer year after year. Great, right? Well, yes, for any sun lovers out there, but this could have a knock-on effect for our gardens-which in turn will continue to affect our environment. So, what should you do? If you don't already have one, get a water butt, which is a great resource for capturing some of the water that falls into our garden when it rains. If you do have one, add another! Catching rain water to use on your floral displays and lawn will help you minimise your mains water usage, thus helping the environment and aiding self-sufficiency. Not only are water butts great for giving you an alternative source of water instead of using your home's supply, they are also effective at reducing how much water enters your property's drains to reduce the risk of flooding.

Another way to cut your water usage is by re-using any 'grey water' which has previously been used to wash dishes or have a bath.

Hopefully the tips above will give you some inspiration to start working on your urban garden in order to reduce your carbon footprint and play your part in preventing global temperatures from rising any further.

Kelly Marsh is Content & Category Manager at Suttons Consumer Products.

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Ready, set, sow: How to use your garden to combat climate change

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Whether it's the shrinking of glaciers, animals being forced to relocate, ice on rivers breaking up at a much more rapid pace or trees flowering sooner, the dramatic effects of climate change are being seen all across the globe.

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Epic

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instant access to thousands of great kids books.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Instantly access 40,000 high-quality books for kids

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The leading digital library for kids offering unlimited access to 40,000 of the best children's books of all time. Sign up for a free 30 day trial to instantly access high-quality online books for kids, ebooks, audio books, quizzes, videos, and more.

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Hungry Venus flytraps snap shut on a host of unfortunate flies | Life - BBC

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An urban heat island occurs when a city experiences much warmer temperatures than nearby rural areas.

Why does this happen?

An urban area is a city. A rural area is out in the country. The sun's heat and light reach the city and the country in the same way. The difference in temperature between urban and less-developed rural areas has to do with how well the surfaces in each environment absorb and hold heat.

If you travel to a rural area, you'll probably find that most of the region is covered with plants. Grass, trees and farmland covered with crops, as far as the eye can see.

Plants take up water from the ground through their roots. Then, they store the water in their stems and leaves. The water eventually travels to small holes on the underside of leaves. There, the liquid water turns into water vapor and is released into the air. This process is called transpiration. It acts as nature's air conditioner.

You can feel cooling transpiration at work on a hot summer day. On a sunny day, go outside and find a sidewalk that is right next to a patch of grass. Feel both surfaces. The grass should feel cooler on your skin than the pavement-and that's mostly due to transpiration!

When you visit a big city, you won't see many plants. Instead, you'll see sidewalks, streets, parking lots and tall buildings. These structures are usually made up of materials such as cement, asphalt, brick, glass, steel and dark roofs.

What do urban building materials have in common?

First of all, materials such as asphalt, steel, and brick are often very dark colors-like black, brown and grey. A dark object absorbs all wavelengths of light energy and converts them into heat, so the object gets warm. In contrast, a white object reflects all wavelengths of light. The light is not converted into heat and the temperature of the white object does not increase noticeably. Thus, dark objects-such as building materials-absorb heat from the sun.

To cool down urban heat islands, some cities are 'lightening' streets. This is done by covering black asphalt streets, parking lots, and dark roofs with a more reflective gray coating. These changes can drop urban air temperatures dramatically, especially during the heat of summer.

Planting gardens on urban rooftops can also help to cool down the city, too! In fact, a study in Los Angeles, California, calculated that changes like these would be enough to save close to $100 million per year in energy costs!

Urban building materials are another reason that urban areas trap heat. Many modern building materials are impervious surfaces. This means that water can't flow through surfaces like a brick or a patch of cement like it would through a plant. Without a cycle of flowing and evaporating water, these surfaces have nothing to cool them down.

To help cool the heat island, builders can use materials that will allow water to flow through. These building materials-called permeable materials-promote the capture and flow of water, which cools urban regions.

What does it mean?

Urban heat islands are one of the easiest ways to see how human impact can change our planet. After all, sidewalks, parking lots and skyscrapers wouldn't exist if humans weren't there to build them. And although these structures are essential to city living, the heat islands they create can be dangerous for humans.

In the summer, New York City is about 7°F (4°C) hotter than its surrounding areas. That doesn't seem like much, but these higher temperatures can cause people to become dehydrated or suffer from heat exhaustion. The hot temps also require more energy to operate fans and air conditioners. This can lead to power outages and a serious danger to public health.

But, there are things we can do to help cool the cities down. And NASA satellites can help to figure out where these cities are the hottest.

Earth-observing satellites, such as Landsat and Suomi-NPP, can keep a close eye on the Earth's vegetation and surface temperature. Scientists can use this information to track hotspots in cities across the planet. NASA scientists, with their global satellite views, are working to understand urban heat islands and help urban planners to build more energy efficient, cooler and safer cities.

Related NASA Missions

Related Resources for Educators

Story Map: Creation of Urban Heat Islands
Urban Heat Island Lessons and Activities

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An urban heat island occurs when a city experiences much warmer temperatures than nearby rural areas. An urban area is a city. A rural area is out in the country. The sun's heat and light reach the city and the country in the same way.

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Reviews

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Problem: There is little space in the city for gardens.
Action: Design gardens for small spaces in a city.

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Epic

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instant access to thousands of great kids books.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Instantly access 40,000 high-quality books for kids

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The leading digital library for kids offering unlimited access to 40,000 of the best children's books of all time. Sign up for a free 30 day trial to instantly access high-quality online books for kids, ebooks, audio books, quizzes, videos, and more.

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Pitcher Plant

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Extinction Risk

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Earlier this month four men were arrested for poaching on the Holly Shelter Game Land preserve in North Carolina. Their arrest made national headlines, and history, as they became the first people charged with a felony for stealing Venus flytrap plants ( Dionaea muscipula) from the wild.

Yes, Venus flytrap poaching is a thing. Not only that, it threatens the existence of this iconic but endangered carnivorous plant in the wild. The four men arrested this month had 970 Venus flytraps in their possession-almost 3 percent of the entire species's naturally growing population.

Although Venus flytraps appear for sale in greenhouses around the world, they actually have an extremely limited wild range: about 120 kilometers around Wilmington, N.C.-and, even there, they remain rare. The plants grow only in bogs and many of their habitats have been lost to development over the past century. Flytraps disappeared in other locations after fire-suppression techniques protected properties but allowed brush to thrive, starving the plants of the sunlight they needed to flourish. Today Venus flytraps only survive on a handful of sites, all of which are owned by The Nature Conservancy, the North Carolina government or the U.S. military.

Over the past decades The Nature Conservancy has managed to protect flytraps from development and fire-suppression schemes. Poaching, however, has remained a persistent problem. "We've had flytraps poached on our land," says Debbie Crane, director of communications for The Nature Conservancy's North Carolina chapter, who says thefts of a thousand plants at a time were all too common. The crime, until last December, was considered to be a mere misdemeanor with a maximum $50 fine. "People would get a slap on the hand in court, and they didn't care," Crane says. "They came out of court grinning."

A new law that went into effect on December 1 should help change that. Stealing Venus flytraps is now a felony, punishable by 25 to 39 months in jail-a penalty the four men arrested this month will face if convicted. "What makes poaching so sad and stupid is that the people who are doing it are local folks," Crane says. "They're not making much money off of it. They're selling the bulbs for maybe 25 cents. It's an incredibly stupid thing that they're going to wipe out this wonderful thing in nature."

What makes all of this worse is that flytraps, unlike most other carnivorous plants, grow extremely well in captivity, so wild plants aren't even necessary to feed the existing market. "Flytraps love cloning," Crane notes, who says she is kind of obsessed with the plants. "You can create them in a greenhouse very easily, and it's being done all over the world. They're being sold legally in a lot of places because they're cloned."

The plants are also, she argues, the most charismatic species in North Carolina. "This is our natural heritage," she says.

Venus flytraps obviously won't go extinct anytime soon-they're too popular and too easy to cultivate-but the wild plants can't survive many more big poaching events like this one. Their loss would not only eliminate one of the most beloved plant species on the planet, it would also be a blow to the North Carolina economy. "We've had people from all over the world come here to see flytraps," Crane says. "If the plants are gone, the tourists are not going to visit."

To help protect the plants even further, The Nature Conservancy is about to start a new public education campaign while looking for ways to create other economic opportunities for potential poachers. "A lot of people don't even realize they've got this incredibly special, cool thing sitting in their backyard," she says. "This is a plant that Darwin himself called one of the most amazing plants in the world. We think that we need to educate people about how special they are."
Photos by Dan Mele courtesy of The Nature Conservancy

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Venus Flytraps Risk Extinction in the Wild at the Hands of Poachers

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Earlier this month four men were arrested for poaching on the Holly Shelter Game Land preserve in North Carolina. Their arrest made national headlines, and history, as they became the first people charged with a felony for stealing Venus flytrap plants (Dionaea muscipula) from the wild.

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Plants Bite Back (analog text)

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Venus Fly Trap and Pitcher Plant

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"I want people to get passionate about plants," says Lisa Van Cleef about a new exhibit at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers. "Everybody gets excited about the zoo and animals, but once you start looking at plants you find they have a lot going on, too!"

Especially the carnivores, or meat eaters, that use the sneakiest of tricks to trap their insect dinners. Take bladderworts, for example. They appear so small and delicate growing in a quiet pond. But these are the fastest-known killers of the plant kingdom, able to suck in unsuspecting mosquito larvae in 1/50 of a second using a trap door!

Once the trap door closes on the victim, digestive enzymes similar to those in the human stomach slowly consume the insect. When dinner is over, the plant ejects the remains and is ready to trap again.

Carnivorous plants grow in places with soil that doesn't offer much food value. "You and I could take a vitamin pill," says Van Cleef. "But these amazing plants have had to evolve over thousands of years, developing insect traps to get their nutritional needs met. Just look at all they've done in the fight to survive."

The traps can be well-disguised to fool the eye, like pitcher plants, which get their name because they look like beautiful pitchers full of nectar.

The Asian pitcher plant, for example, has a brightly colored rim and an enticing half-closed lid. Curious insects are tempted to come close and take a sip, then slide down the slippery slope to their deaths.

Hair-like growths along the pitcher walls ensure that nothing can scramble out, and the digestive enzymes can get to work. A tiny insect called a midge might be digested in a few hours, but a fly takes a couple of days.

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"I want people to get passionate about plants," says Lisa Van Cleef about a new exhibit at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers. "Everybody gets excited about the zoo and animals, but once you start looking at plants you find they have a lot going on, too!"