- The CGIAR spatial crowd get it together? Not holding my breath.
- So tell me about that biodiversity-poverty link. Well, more research is, ahem, needed. Wet, for want of a better word.
- All the different kinds of “spots” for livestock diseases. How did they cope with the poor data? And have the various hotspots and coldspots been considered in drawing up the new research priorities for livestock?
- UNDP stumps up $4 million to plan biodiversity management in Romania. Including agrobiodiversity? Not holding my breath.
- A socio-economic impact analysis of cultural diversity in cities does not consider agriculture at all. There’s a PhD there for someone.
- IUCN’s plans for the Iraqi marshes. Thesiger unavailable for comment.
- If it can be done with amphibians, why the hell can’t it be done with agricultural biodiversity?
- Biojoy swamps Bioversity as Biohappiness book is launched.
- Yeah but was there any of this? And if not, why not? Via NWFP-Digest-L.
One of the paper’s authors, Delia Grace, responds as follows:
“As you pointed out, the data on livestock is SSA is very poor. As a result our reasoning was deductive rather than inductive, based on evidence on the links between system change, genetic homogeneity, population density, transmission opportunities, species diversity etc on disease emergence and endemicity; it was also based on our own experience (between us multiple decades) of livestock epidemiology in Africa. I can’t speak to use in FARA but the thinking around hot and cold spots is feeding into the CGIAR Consortium Research Program on Agriculture, Nutrition and Health. We are hoping this “megaprogram” will give us the opportunity of ground-truthing and quantifying these disease dynamics trajectories.”