Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is a non-departmental public body in the United Kingdom sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. An internationally important botanical research and education institution, it employs 1,100 staff. Its board of trustees is chaired by Dame Amelia Fawcett.
Sir David Frederick Attenborough is a British broadcaster, biologist, natural historian, and writer. He is best known for writing and presenting, in conjunction with the BBC Studios Natural History Unit, the nine nature documentary series forming the Life collection, a comprehensive survey of animal and plant life on Earth.
Life on Earth: A Natural History by David Attenborough is a British television natural history series made by the BBC in association with Warner Bros. Television and Reiner Moritz Productions. It was transmitted in the UK from 16 January 1979.
The Trials of Life: A Natural History of Behaviour is a BBC nature documentary series written and presented by David Attenborough, first transmitted in the United Kingdom from 3 October 1990.
The Blue Planet is a British nature documentary series created and co-produced by the BBC and Discovery Channel. It premiered on 12 September 2001 in the United Kingdom. It is narrated by David Attenborough.
Life in the Undergrowth is a BBC nature documentary series written and presented by David Attenborough, first transmitted in the UK from 23 November 2005.
Life in Cold Blood is a BBC nature documentary series written and presented by David Attenborough, first broadcast in the United Kingdom from 4 February 2008 on BBC One.
A nature documentary or wildlife documentary is a genre of documentary film or series about animals, plants, or other non-human living creatures. Nature documentaries usually concentrate on video taken in the subject's natural habitat, but often including footage of trained and captive animals, too. Sometimes they are about wildlife or ecosystems in relationship to human beings. Such programmes are most frequently made for television, particularly for public broadcasting channels, but some are also made for the cinema. The proliferation of this genre occurred almost simultaneously alongside the production of similar television series which is distributed across the world.
Plant collecting is the acquisition of plant specimens for the purposes of research, cultivation, or as a hobby. Plant specimens may be kept alive, but are more commonly dried and pressed to preserve the quality of the specimen. Plant collecting is an ancient practice with records of a Chinese botanist collecting roses over 5000 years ago.
The Living Planet: A Portrait of the Earth is a BBC nature documentary series written and presented by David Attenborough, first transmitted in the UK from 19 January 1984.
The Private Life of Plants is a BBC nature documentary series written and presented by David Attenborough, first shown in the United Kingdom from 11 January 1995.
Kew Gardens is a botanic garden in southwest London that houses the "largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world". Founded in 1840, from the exotic garden at Kew Park, its living collections include some of the 27,000 taxa curated by Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, while the herbarium, one of the largest in the world, has over 8.5 million preserved plant and fungal specimens. The library contains more than 750,000 volumes, and the illustrations collection contains more than 175,000 prints and drawings of plants. It is one of London's top tourist attractions and is a World Heritage Site.
First Life is a 2010 British nature documentary series written and presented by David Attenborough, also known by the expanded titles David Attenborough's First Life (UK) and First Life with David Attenborough (USA). It was first broadcast in the US as a two-hour special on the Discovery Channel on 24 October 2010. In the United Kingdom it was broadcast as a two-part series on BBC Two on 5 November 2010. First Life sees Attenborough tackle the subject of the origin of life on Earth. He investigates the evidence from the earliest fossils, which suggest that complex animals first appeared in the oceans around 540 million years ago, an event known as the Cambrian Explosion. Trace fossils of multicellular organisms from an even earlier period, the Ediacaran biota, are also examined. Attenborough travels to Canada, Morocco and Australia, using some of the latest fossil discoveries and their nearest equivalents amongst living species to reveal what life may have been like at that time. Visual effects and computer animation are used to reconstruct and animate the extinct life forms. Attenborough's Journey, a documentary film profiling the presenter as he journeyed around the globe filming First Life, was shown on BBC Two on 24 October 2010. A hardback book to accompany the series, authored by Matt Kaplan with a foreword by Attenborough, was published in September 2010.
David Attenborough's Life on Land: A DVD Encyclopaedia is a DVD box set of nature documentaries made by the BBC Natural History Unit. It comprises six series spread across 15 discs, all of them written and presented by David Attenborough, and together forming a comprehensive introduction to the major groups of terrestrial lifeforms. The series were filmed between 1987 and 2008, but are presented in the order in which the groups evolved, beginning with invertebrates and culminating with human beings, to tell the continuous story of the development of life on land. With a total running time exceeding 34 hours, it represents an in-depth visual survey of the living world as it exists today, at the beginning of the 21st century.
The Penguin King is a British 2012 natural history documentary which follows the life of a male king penguin on South Georgia. Released in 3D and 2D, The Penguin King is the second collaboration between Sky, Atlantic Productions and David Attenborough, who wrote and narrated the film. It was preceded by Flying Monsters 3D, screened a year earlier, and was followed by the three-part series Kingdom of Plants 3D in spring 2012. The film features a music score from UK composer James Edward Barker.
Galapagos 3D is a British nature documentary series written and presented by David Attenborough, directed by Martin Williams and filmed in 3D. Attenborough returns to the Galápagos Islands for the fourth time in his career and travels throughout the archipelago to explain their origins and their unique fauna in evolutionary terms.
David Attenborough's Natural History Museum Alive is a 2014 British documentary film. Written and presented by David Attenborough, it aired on Sky One on New Year's Day 2014.
Paula J Rudall (born 1954) is a British botanist, who was Head of the Micromorphology Section (1999–2014) and Head of the Department of Comparative Plant and Fungal Biology at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Extinction: The Facts is a 2020 documentary film by the natural historian David Attenborough which aired on the BBC. It depicts the continuing sixth mass extinction, caused by humans, and the consequences of biodiversity loss and climate change. It also suggests positive action which can be taken to halt or reverse these effects. With a peak viewership of roughly 4.5 million on its premiere, the programme received positive critical reception.
The Green Planet is a 2022 nature documentary series on plants and their relationship with animals, humans and the environment. It was produced by BBC Studios Natural History Unit and narrated and presented by David Attenborough.
