Month: February 2011

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Featured: Agrobiodiversity and language

Pierre C. Sibiry Traore makes an offer:

I’ve been trying to join the ethnologue.com database with detailed shapefiles of dominant linguistic groups of Africa at a fairly detailed level, but lack time/resources to dig in further. If someone, self-funded (PhD student…) is interested in an in-depth investigation I’d be willing to spend some time towards joint publications! Or better, host him/her at SotubaGIS, Bamako, Mali.

Any takers?

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Agrobiodiversity and languages in danger

I’ve finally been able to obtain the dataset on which UNESCO’s interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger is based. 1 In the map below, which you’ll be able to see bigger if you click on it, you can see Chad’s endangered languages (brighter red means more endangered), mashed up with germplasm from Chad listed in Genesys.

Would it be sensible to give particular priority for germplasm collecting to areas where languages are threatened with extinction?

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News on the Desert Research Center genebank

Ismail Abdel Galil (left), founder of the looted Egyptian Deserts Gene Bank, has told SciDev.net that he is hopeful that the EDGB will be able to recover some of the genebank’s material that was duplicated at the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew. Galil confirmed that most of the material was not duplicated, not even at the National Gene Bank in Giza, which was not looted.

SciDev.net’s report, more than three weeks after the news broke, here, adds some information to sketchy details we had before. The looting of the Desert Research Center in Cairo was carried out by “mobs,” while “Bedouin groups in the Sinai region, angered by the Mubarak government’s policies towards them, went on the rampage” and attacked the EGDB. According to Hazem Badr, SciDev.net’s reporter,

DRC chairman Ibrahim M. Nasr … estimated the losses at the facilities in Cairo and North Sinai at around US$1.3 million. That figure does not include the desert plant gene bank, some of which has been irretrievably lost.

Galil, who founded the desert genebank in 1996, had been honoured by Bioversity International as one of the Guardians of Diversity in the Mediterranean at a celebration in Rome in May 2009. 2 Unfortunately the genebank’s “efficient operations and state of the art technology,” cited in the award, were no match for looters.