News

New initiatives boost access to the University Herbarium collectionThe University Herbarium has taken a major step towards making more of its collections available to the world’s research community with the appointment of Dr Anne Dubéarnès as its first Special Collections Researcher. Dr Dubéarnès will focus on identifying and mobilising some of the…

Visualising long-range atmospheric transport of crop pests and diseasesSome of the greatest challenges to food production in low- and middle-income countries arise when crops are devastated by the sudden outbreak of destructive migratory insects and diseases. Pests and pathogenic spores can be channelled by air streams over long distances, crossing…

A break from the lawn: Can an iconic meadow seed wider changeBy Jacqueline GargetIt's No-Mow May - the month we’re encouraged to let lawns and verges grow, wildflowers bloom, and insects feed. Opinions are divided, and understandably so: letting lawns go wild breaks with a 300 year-old tradition. But the gardeners of an iconic setting are on a redu…

Centromeres are chromosome regions that play the same vital role during cell division across the tree of life, yet display enormous interspecies diversity. An international team of researchers has discovered that variation in centromere DNA sequences can be strikingly large even within a single species. These findings, now published in the journal …

A new study by James Ball and colleagues in the Cambridge Conservation Research Institute has developed a computer vision method for delineating tree crowns in tropical forests from aerial RGB imagery, with the new approach available as an open-source Python package for broader uptake and further development.Monitoring the growth and mortality of u…

A letter to Science, co-authored by 17 conservation and climate researchers, argues that carbon credits can be a valuable tool for climate change mitigation and forest conservation, but their success depends on improving their credibility.The co-authors are from the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Exeter, Bangor, São Paulo, North Carolina, VU Am…

Avocados (Persea americana) are not typically considered a food security crop, however, in rural regions in South America, avocados are an important part of the local diet and are grown by small-scale farmers, providing both a source of nutrients and income for local communities. A major obstacle preventing farmers supplying international markets …

Mapping Hong Kong’s vegetation fire historyNew ‘LTS fire pipeline’ reveals unprecedented detail A study by PhD student Aland Chan and colleagues at the Conservation Research Institute has developed a new way of mapping and representing fire occurrence in natural vegetation in Hong Kong, China, forging the basis for a new monitoring system that fir…

The Leverhulme Trust have awarded Crop Science Centre scientists a grant for developing technology capable of overcoming the resistance of crop-damaging nematode worms to genetic alteration. This technology will be similar to the COVID-19 vaccine, where a special molecule is wrapped in a fatty layer to protect it and make it easier to deliver. Nema…

Subset of resistant-crop growers needed for social optimumFarmers’ behaviour is integral to crop disease control, but has received surprisingly little attention from researchers until recently - an individual farmer makes decisions that affect not only their own farming practice, but can also affect that of their neighbours.In earlier behavioural m…

Redirect once published on cam.ac.ukResearchers have discovered how a South African daisy makes fake lady flies on its petals to trick male flies into pollinating it.A male fly approaches a flower, lands on top of what he thinks is a female fly, and jiggles around. He’s trying to mate, but it isn’t quite working. He has another go. Eventually he gi…

Understanding fire risk on a global scale is the challenge taken up by 4C PhD students Jovana Knezevic and Onkar Gulati, whose solution ‘FireSight’ recently won the Lucy Cavendish LucEnt Challenge, and was named runner up in the Cambridge Zero Climate Challenge.FireSight uses satellite remote sensing data analysed using machine learning to understa…

If crop science continues to advance at the pace it has over the last two decades, we hope secure, sustainable and affordable food could be only a further decade away. This is according to a research review by scientists at the Crop Science Centre, which has summarised the last ten years of dramatic advances on the topic of how legumes use benefici…

Tip of the Apex: 100 important questions for future Plant ScientistsUpdated list shows striking prominence of climate change and its effects.The Department’s Dr Cerian Webb has contributed to a study to identify 100 important questions facing plant science research, published today in New Phyologist (here and here)The project collected over 600 que…

Virus infection helps make tomato plants more successful fathersGene flow boost may aid development of virus-susceptible plant populationsDr Alexandra Murphy and her colleagues in the Virology and Molecular Plant Pathology group have discovered that bumblebees can preferentially boost the transfer of male genes in virus-infected tomato plants, whic…