For those of you who know me, you know I'm crazy about collecting and organizing photos and video of the plants I've come across. Turns out, Jonas, one of the founders of Untamed Science is European (Swedish actually), and so we tend to make our way to that side of the pond quite often. In doing so, we've started to compile a nice list of plants from Europe. This pages serves as a mere guide, or reference for others interested in the plants of Europe, yet are having a hard time finding good resources on it. 

PLANT DIVERSITY - AN ASSORTMENT OF AWESOMENESS

Once a year a holiday known as Earth Day roles around. For those of us that are in school, it's a time to plant trees, start recycling programs and do other "earthy" things. But what does that mean? It seems that most people treat Earth Day day a bit like Valentines day or Saint Patricks day. Its simply an event on the calendar that doesn't seem to have a lot of meaning anymore. In fact, the role Earth Day plays has changed since it was first concieved. But to understand that we need some history

Predation

Simply put, predation (or carnivory) is a feeding strategy in which animals consume other animals. In this strategy predators are the hunters and prey are what they hunt. Predators can be fierce hunters like tigers and eagles and sharks, or they can be small and unassuming like dragonflies, bats, and moles. Predation occurs in all phyla of Kingdom Animalia. Everything from the very primitive protozoans to the highly-evolved mammals predate each other.

Organisms interact with each other in a variety of ways.  These interactions can be cooperative, antagonistic, defensive, reciprocal, harmful, communal, opportunistic, beneficial, or neutral.  Symbioses encapsulate the relationships that different species of organisms have with each other: the good, the bad, and the ugly.  These interactions typically fall into one of three categories: mutualism, parasitism, and commensalism.  

It’s a struggle, a fight, two entities opposing each other for a desired outcome. We see the forces of competition at work in our everyday lives- feuding political parties, commercial product markets, rivaling athletics. Competition happens when two parties want the same thing, but there isn’t enough of it to go around…so they compete for it.

But Jupiter forbade, and snatched them through the air,
In whirlwinds up to heaven and fixed them there,
Where the new constellations nightly rise,
and add a lustre to the northern skies...
-Ovid's Metamorphoses- The Story of Callisto

Where can we find them?
Abiotic Factors: Climate
Abiotic Factors: Permafrost
What do they look like?
Glacial Landscapes
Plant Communities and Adaptations
Arctic Animals

"If any of them, serf or huntsman or anybody at all, stepped on the quagmires, the same fate befell him a thousand years ago as would overtake him now. In he would go and down he would sink to the Marsh King, as the call him. He rules down below over the whole kingdom of bogs and swamps..."
The Marsh King's Daughter- Hans Christian Andersen

Temperate Deciduous Forests

There is no season such delight can bring,
As summer, autumn, winter, and the spring.
William Browne - "Variety"

Not every region of the world experiences a change in seasons. Some are always blanketed in ice, while others have warm sunshine all year round. For those of us who live in temperate regions, seasonal changes happen every few months. You could be darting across a lake on water skis in July and, 6 months later, you could be racing across that same lake on ice skates!