NATURE reveals the importance of an unlikely partnership between a regal tree and a tiny wasp in The Queen of Trees.

It may be one of nature’s oddest couples: a tiny wasp that can barely be seen, and a giant fig tree, the sycomore, which shelters a remarkable menagerie of wildlife among its limbs. The wasp and the fig depend on each other for survival. Without the wasp, the tree could not pollinate its flowers and produce seeds. Without the fig, the wasp would have nowhere to lay its eggs.

The Queen of Trees shows this delicate dance of survival in exquisite detail, including spectacular close-ups of the wasp’s remarkable life inside a ripening fig. To capture such incredible images, filmmakers Victoria Stone and Mark Deeble spent two years camped out near a giant sycomore fig in Kenya’s outback, documenting the tree’s pivotal role as a source of food and shelter for everything from gray hornbills, Africa’s largest bird, to swarms of invading insects searching for food. In a surprising turn, some insects come to the tree’s aid — sparking a battle you won’t want to miss.

The queen African honeybee rules the savannah - even elephants panic at the buzzing of her hive. This recreates the life of the queen and her colony as they fight to survive. Ground-breaking close-up photography shows a bee-eye view of their world, from the queen murdering her sisters to fighting off giant invaders and eventually migrating across the savannah to the great Mount Kenya.

Accompanied by short film Safe in the City with Dr George McGavin on the growth of the urban beekeeper.

A real-life drama about a family of chimps trapped in a lost world. They live in a deep and ancient forested gorge that runs though the African savannah and for fifteen years it has been cut off from the rest of the jungle, leaving the chimps imprisoned.

Here, they face a daily life-or-death dilemma: whether to leave the safety of the gorge and venture into the predator-ridden savannah to find food, or face hunger. There's now only twenty of them left and as Brutus the alpha male loses his grip, can the family hold it together or is time running out for the Kyambura chimps?

Ice is one of the strangest, most beguiling and mesmerising substances in the world. Full of contradictions, it is transparent yet it can glow with colour, it is powerful enough to shatter rock but it can melt in the blink of an eye. It takes many shapes, from the fleeting beauty of a snowflake to the multi-million tonne vastness of a glacier and the eeriness of the ice fountains of far-flung moons.

Science writer Dr Gabrielle Walker has been obsessed with ice ever since she first set foot on Arctic sea ice. In this programme she searches out some of the secrets hidden deep within the ice crystal to try to discover how something so ephemeral has the power to sculpt landscapes, to preserve our past and inform our future.

Using one single, unbroken shot, Journey to the Edge of the Universe explores what you would find if you were able to travel the entire length of our universe.

Venturing past Neil Armstrong’s footsteps still sealed on the moon, the special soars over brightly illuminated Venus onto Mercury, a small planet made almost entirely of iron that may perhaps be the left-over remnants of a much larger planet. 

Mars is a planet of extremes: with tornadoes, volcanoes and canyons unlike anything seen on Earth while Jupiter’s ever-present red storm is three times the size of Earth and has lasted for hundreds of years. 

Reaching the Saturn moon Titan, you'll find a landscape closely resembling Earth, but Titan’s rivers, lakes and oceans are not made of water, but of liquid methane.  Could life exist here? 

Travelling more than 90 trillion kilometres from Earth, viewers step inside the Epsilon Eridani star system where spectacular rings of dust and ice resemble the formation of our own solar system 4.5 billion years ago. 

Even further out is star Gliese 581, about the same age as our sun with a planet that is just the right distance to possibly support life. 

Passing by the Pillars of Creation, viewers can see deep inside these clouds where huge stars being born, bringing light and perhaps even life to the universe.

Natural history series exploring the Galapagos Islands - a land of fire set astride the equator and exposed to powerful forces of nature. This concluding episode reveals how, through time and isolation, the local animals and plants have evolved the most surprising ways to cope with the profound geological and climatic forces affecting them.
Female land iguanas are forced to climb to the summit of the harshest and most volcanically active of all the Galapagos islands to lay their eggs in the few pockets of warm, soft soil that exist here. Fur seals have learned to seek daytime shelter from the equatorial sun in magical undersea lava grottos. The most bizarre collection of plankton rise from the abyss in the middle of the night on currents welling up from deep beneath the flanks of Galapagos. And comical blue-footed boobies have a flexible breeding season, reacting fast when the ocean currents are at their richest.

Natural history series exploring the Galapagos Islands, which lie 1,000 kilometres off the coast of South America.
In the early 16th century, the first person in recorded history to set foot on Galapagos, the Bishop of Panama, deemed it a hellish place. He found no water and two of his men and ten of his horses perished.
Through time, this forbidding archipelago became the haunt of pirates and whalers, but as more people came to Galapagos, they began to see it in a whole new light.
In 1835, Charles Darwin's brush with these islands became the catalyst for a revolution that would transform our understanding of life on Earth.
From flightless cormorants hunting underwater to giant tortoises courting on the rim of an active volcano, a look at the hidden side of Galapagos, revealing why it is such a fascinating showcase for evolution.

The Galapagos islands are a fascinating microcosm of natural life and home to some of the most astonishing creatures found anywhere on Earth. With spectacular cinematography from land, sea and air, and blending rugged volcanic landscapes with intimate animal behaviour, this ambitious series from the BBC's Natural History Unit brings this remarkable archipelago to captivating life.
The Galapagos are no ordinary islands. They sit astride the equator, almost a thousand kilometres off the coast of South America, and are connected directly to the heart of the planet. The product of a volcanic hotspot, from the moment they are born, the islands are carried on a remarkable millenia-long journey before sinking back beneath the waves.
This opening episode chronicles the many fascinating stages of the island chain's existence, and reveals how creatures have developed enterprising ways of dealing with life on this restless Pacific outpost.
Witness the dramatic eruption of the largest of all the Galapagos volcanoes, Sierra Negra, blowing smoke and ash seven miles into the sky; marine iguanas, the worlds only seagoing lizards, leaping off lava cliffs into treacherous surf; Galapagos giant tortoises, the largest on Earth, being groomed by Darwin's finches, and the magical courtship display of the waved albatross.

Around the world, a new generation of astronomers are hunting for the most mysterious objects in the universe. Young stars, black holes, even other forms of life. They have created a dazzling new set of super-telescopes that promise to rewrite the story of the heavens.

This film follows the men and women who are pushing the limits of science and engineering in some of the most extreme environments on earth. But most strikingly of all, no-one really knows what they will find out there.

Not even drop-dead good looks and boyish enthusiasm could save Brian Cox from the first law of science on TV. No matter how hard you try, you can't make cutting-edge astrophysics intelligible for the scientifically illiterate. After all, even the scientifically literate barely have a clue what's going on; and if they do, they don't always agree. So throughout Wonders of the Solar System, I found myself saying: "I'm sure this is a-m-aaazing, Brian, but I haven't a clue why."

Horizon: Seeing Stars showcasing the world's best telescopes, got round this problem by not bothering to explain the difficult stuff, the basic message of the voiceover being: "This is all really important but I'm not going to say why, as you won't understand, so just sit back and enjoy the pictures because they are stunning." This no-nonsense approach was surprisingly effective because it lived up to its billing: the images were breathtaking.

Lencois, located in northeastern Brazil, is known as the whitest dunes on earth. However, when the rain comes every half year, this scenery of pure white sand stretching over 150 thousand hectares completely changes. Countless lagoons are formed, creating a startling contrast between the white sand and blue water. Even fish suddenly appear in these lagoons. Where do they come from? Through a year-long coverage of Lencois, this episode reveals the truth about this surreal nature's beauty.

 Nature Documentary published by NHK broadcasted as part of NHK Nature Wonder Land series in 2008

Storm is an extraordinary wolf - the head of a pack in Canada's frozen north that hunts the giant buffalo herds. This pack came to fame in Frozen Planet and now cameraman Jeff Turner spends a year with Storm and his wolf family, learning how they survive in this harsh wilderness and whether Storm can pass his hunting skills on to the new generation of wolf cubs.

While Asiatic black bears hang from the trees and chipmunks search for food, the spotted sika deer travels to the coast to supplement its diet with kelp. The presence of deer on this open ground attracts the region's big predator, the Amur tiger. But the largest cat in the world has dangerous enemies itself: poaching and habitat destruction are an ever-present threat to tigers in the Ussuriland region of Russia.

It is an uneasy talk about the destiny of the rare cat that lives together with us, Russians, on the same land. The severe plot of the film reminds a western, but the action takes place not in the Wild West but in the Russian Far East. And the shots and cuts here are of the same despair. The killed tigers and cut down cedars fall on the ground and will never rise again. The last scene of the film is the famous picture of Vladimir Putin kissing the Amur tiger. This symbolic gesture shows the hope of thousands of people that a tiger has a chance to survive.

After camping out in one of the world’s most hostile places for over six weeks, presenter Liz Bonnin and the canny ­conversationalists finally spotted the beautiful big cats.
The filming first was part of a BBC2 wildlife documentary, Operation Snow Tiger, to be shown tonight.
Despite their light orange coats and black stripes the animals are incredibly difficult to spot, even against a white, snowy backdrop.
But they are rarely seen in the wild because, tragically, fewer than 350 Siberian tigers exist today after being targeted by poachers who can flog them on the black market for £30,000.
Once killed, a Siberian tiger’s bones are sold for Chinese medicines. Its skin will be callously hung in homes as a ­symbol of status.
Having once roamed vast tracks of northern Asia, the tigers are now ­confined to a remote part of far-eastern Russia, north of Vladivostok.

Description:

Blue Planet is a space film about Earth. From the orbit of the U.S. space shuttle, where the curvature of the globe and the shape of its continents stand out sharply, Earth is revealed as a place of constant, even violent change. It is also delicate and fragile, unique in the solar system and possibly the entire universe. How did Earth begin? How is it changing, and what is mankind's role in these changes? Blue Planet investigates these questions with footage taken on the ocean floor, on the ground and in space, state-of-the-art computer animation and new data from satellites in geosynchronous orbit. We gain new insight into Earth, our one and only home.

Description:

Wild Australia - The Edge, filmed on the doorstep of Australia's largest city, is about an ancient wilderness ... a labyrinth of lost worlds and magical places - beautiful and treacherous waterfalls, canyons and underground rivers, carved by streams that lead back into a world as it was ninety million years ago. In a remote ravine, 40 ancient trees survive unchanged from the age of the dinosaurs. Rappel into this world of exotic creatures and unique plant life with our modern bushwhackers.

Description:

Alaska: Spirit of the Wild is a 70mm Academy Award-nominated American documentary film featuring the landscape and wildlife of Alaska. It is narrated by Charlton Heston and released to IMAX theaters in 1997.
Alaskan wildlife featured in the film include moose, bears, seals, wolves, caribou, and whales, while narrator Heston provides background information. The film was produced by the same IMAX filmmaking team that created Africa: The Serengeti. Similar shots of vast landscapes, which are particularly well suited for IMAX's large screen theaters, and entertaining wildlife footage is featured. Aerial photography and underwater photography techniques are utilized throughout the production.
It has been well received by critics and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject in 1998.

 

The Alps is a 2007 American documentary film about the climbing of the north face of the Eiger in the Bernese Alps by John Harlin III, son of John Harlin who died on the same ascent 40 years earlier. It was shot in 70mm IMAX.

 In the air above Switzerland, on the sheer rock-and-ice wall known as the Eiger, an American climber is about to embark on the most perilous and meaningful ascent he has ever undertaken: an attempt to scale the legendary mountain that took his renowned fathers life. Against a backdrop of overwhelming natural beauty, The Alps is a true-life story of extrodinary courage. It's the intensely personal journey of a man who has every reason not to climb the deadly Eiger North Face, yet climb it he must.
Featuring some of the most spectacular giantscreen imagery yet seen, the film celebrates the unsurpassed beauty of the Alps and the indomitable spirit of the people who live there.

Description:

This series of documentaries is dedicated to discovering the magnificent scenery of mainland France and its territories throughout the world. These regions are remarkable for their natural wealth and beauty, and for the man made structures that have been established to protect them. Reserves, national parks, mangroves, islands, marshlands and coral reefs are all examples of how man and nature have carved out and shaped these jewels of nature.

In the company of scientists, nature lovers and « guardians » of these sites, all of whom are involved in the study and the protection of an enchanting yet fragile flora and fauna, this series will take you to rare and precious French land and seascapes where man can still find himself in total harmony with nature.

• Guardians Of Nature: Italy
  Although very urbanised, Italy has succeeded in preserving its natural wealth. It is also planning to reintroduce a wild duck which nearly extinct.
  

Description:

Kilimanjaro: To the Roof of Africa is an adventure of the human spirit that follows five trekkers and a local Chagga guide to the top of Kilimanjaro, the largest freestanding mountain in the world. Along their journey of courage and endurance, this diverse group of trekkers encounter strange landscapes and endure harsh conditions as they travel through five climate zones ranging from the lower rainforest reaches of Kilimanjaro to the summit's arctic glaciers, all the while learning about the formation of the African continent and the Great Rift Valley.