Emelie Healy of FAO’s Land and Water Development Division had a post recently on the PPGIS discussion list saying that FAO has updated their dams database of Africa by overlaying with Google Earth. 1 They have also recently updated their irrigated areas map. It’s all on their website. And speaking of water, more than half of the world’s lakes are facing serious problems caused by agricultural activities, according to a paper presented at the 11th International Living Lakes Conference. Which probably feeds back on agriculture in complicated ways. Anyway, I would guess that the effect of dams and new irrigation schemes on local wild biodiversity is usually negative, but is that necessarily always the case also for agrobiodiversity? I suspect so, but is there a possibility that at least sometimes existing crop genetic diversity is simply displaced a bit geographically or ecologically within the same general area? Or augmented by new crop genetic diversity adapted to the new conditions? Or both?
- March 2025: I think the latest data is in Global Damn Watch.
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