by Jules Smith | Mar 27, 2018 | External News
The Florida torreya is North America’s most endangered conifer, with less than one percent of its population remaining. Now, scientists are mounting a last-ditch effort to save the torreya and are considering using new gene-editing technologies to protect it. In early...
by Jules Smith | Mar 1, 2018 | External News
When it comes to biodiversity, humans have been about as good for life on Earth as a giant asteroid slamming into it. Many leading scientists contend that we are in the midst of a mass extinction, not dissimilar to the one that wiped out dinosaurs and countless other...
by Jules Smith | Feb 13, 2018 | External News
The HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology is generating and annotating a reference genome for the American chestnut tree in a project with The American Chestnut Foundation that aims to restore the once dominant tree to forests in the Eastern United States. We are...
by Jules Smith | Dec 22, 2017 | External News
At the turn of the 20th century, the Eastern United States was covered in billions of chestnut trees. In some places, such as the Appalachian Mountains and Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where they thrived in sandy soil, one-quarter of all hardwoods were the majestic...
by Jules Smith | Nov 10, 2017 | External News
Dr. William Powell, professor at State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF) and TACF committee member, was recently interviewed on SciTech Now, a program on PBS that captures the latest breakthroughs in science, technology...
by Jules Smith | Oct 11, 2017 | External News
The Viles Arboretum in Augusta, Maine has been working since the 1980s to bring back the American chestnut tree, which was thought to be lost after a blight from Asia in the early 1900s. Arboretum officials unveiled a set of three interpretive panels Saturday morning...
