A five-week-old baby wedge-tailed eagle. ‘Wedgies’ pair off for life; the male and female both incubate the eggs but Dad does all the hunting once the chicks hatch.
Photo Credit: Simon Cherriman
THE WORLD’S PLANT SPECIES will be collated in one database in a project that can be described as no easy feat.
Four of the world’s leading botanical institutions are compiling a catalogue of every plant on the globe - at least 400,000 species - to be made available online by 2020.
The St Louis-based Missouri Botanical Garden and New York Botanical Garden in the United States have joined forces with the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in the United Kingdom to produce the World Flora catalogue.
Photographer Peter Elfes captures the continuing green flush at Lake Eyre, following unprecedented flooding.
THE LAKE EYRE catchment authority was so impressed by pictures Peter Elfes took of Lake Eyre filling in 2010, that when rain leaked its way into the basin for an unprecedented third year in a row last year, they told him to spend a week in an open helicopter documenting the landscape.
The nickname of the Lake Eyre Basin - the saline footprint of the world’s largest ephemeral lake - is Australia’s ‘dead heart’. But in his 2011 trip Peter witnessed its resuscitation; after decades of absent rain his images document a landscape now bursting with life.
Under whirring blades, in bitterly cold wind and at the mercy of moving frames, he shot new vegetation creeping across the landscape and hidden minerals resurfacing in the water.
This image of a bee antenna and pollen is a mosaic of pollen grain images from the Classifynder pollen microscope.
Photo Credit: CSIRO, Massey Universit
