Bioversity International has just announced the launching of the website of the Platform for Agrobiodiversity Research. You can subscribe to a newsletter, register on and consult a directory of experts, and there’s an online forum coming.
Nibbles: Maize, CWRs, CBD, Icelandic food, Coffee, Incense, Biodiversity Day, Medicinals, Farmers’ rights
- The history of tejate in Mexico illuminates “central irony of globalization.” Cheers!
- WWF says crop wild relatives and landraces in centres of diversity are threatened. Right.
- Danny Hunter reports along much the same lines from COP9, and then reports some more. Such a workhorse!
- The intricacies of Nordic food preparation. Would you say this was cooked, Jeremy?
- Today’s how-x-changed-the-world story brought to you by coffee. Great after rotten shark too.
- Frankincense is good for you. Hippies comment at length.
- Jeremy earns his keep.
- TRAFFIC promotes project ‘Saving Plants that Save Lives and Livelihoods’ at COP9, including with video.
- And the websites just keep on coming. One on Farmers’ Rights launched too.
It’s competition time again!
Ok, so it’s International Day for Biodiversity today and we had this really cool idea about how to celebrate it this year. You’ll recall the theme is Biodiversity and Agriculture, so we figured we had to do something sensational, this being the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog and all. Basically Jeremy and I were going to dress up as vegetables (or fruits — there was much debate on the subject, although thankfully not on the status of the tomato) and run through the Roman Forum shouting anti-biofuel slogans to the tune of “Taxes on the farmer feeds us all.”
Pollinator diversity, pollination services and landscape change
That’s the title (or part of it) of a guest editorial ((Ingolf Steffan-Dewenter, Catrin Westphal (2008) The interplay of pollinator diversity, pollination services and landscape change. Journal of Applied Ecology 45(3), 737–741 doi:10.1111/j.1365-2664.2008.01483.x)) in the latest issue of the Journal of Applied Ecology which introduces a Special Profile entitled “Pollination and Pollinators” (mainly bees, actually).
The papers in this Special Profile cover several of these topics: two papers address the impact of habitat fragmentation and semi-natural landscape elements for population densities, species richness and community composition of bees (Brosi et al. 2008; Osborne et al. 2008). The next three papers focus on the combined effects of local and landscape-scale land use intensity and semi-natural or natural landscape elements on pollinators (Kohler et al. 2008; Rundlöf, Bengtsson & Smith 2008; Winfree et al. 2008). The last two papers focus on pollination functions and consider cross-pollination rates in a major crop (Devaux et al. 2008) and plant–pollinator networks in heathlands (Forup et al. 2008).
The papers are behind paywalls, but the abstracts are still quite useful.
I guess the overall message is that “land use intensification and habitat fragmentation do not only affect pollinator diversity and abundance, but also pollination services” because “pollination success of insect-pollinated plant species is usually not dependent on single, highly specialized pollinator species, but rather on a diverse community of pollinators.” In some places, of course, bees have lots more to contend with.
Nibbles: Fungi, Cacao, Neolithic, New fruits
- Blogger waxes lyrical about African mushrooms.
- Nigeria’s cacao tree need replanting. Will they be? And if so, which varieties will be used? And will they be grown organically?
- Arabidopsis followed farmers into Europe.
- “With the kiwi, there is adventure.“