Century-old papers saved from the bin reveal changes in Europe’s plant life

Plant inventories dating back to 1884 and nearly thrown away enable unique time-lapse study of biodiversity in Swiss meadows

For two years, a team of Swiss researchers crossed the country by train, car and foot, carrying with them a red frame measuring 30 by 30 centimetres. At 277 sites they placed the frame in the grass and counted all of the plant species within it.

The scientists were retracing a path set more than 100 years earlier, when two botanists had done the same thing in exactly the same meadows, long before such plant inventories became common.