As well as feeding Andean peoples for centuries, guinea pigs have helped win twenty-three Nobel Prizes.
Marginality and animal genetic resources
The conventional wisdom is that landraces and local breeds are better adapted to marginal conditions than modern crop varieties and livestock breeds. A paper has just been published in Agricultural Systems that tries to quantify this. The researchers defined marginal areas “as those areas where possible land uses are relatively limited because of higher altitude, shorter growing season, steeper slopes, less fertile soils or broadly speaking because of generally lower soil productivity.” They calculated a synthetic index of marginality using all kinds of environmental and socio-economic data and mapped its value throughout Europe. They also mapped the distribution of goat and sheep breeds using data from the Econogene project. Then they calculated how good the marginality index was at predicting the presence of local breeds. The result: “Increasing marginality, as measured by these indices, is positively and significantly correlated to the fact that local, traditional breeds are present.”
Re-wilding Europe
There was much talk a couple of years back about re-wilding – a suggestion to establish a plausible facsimile of the Pleistocene fauna of North America by introducing carnivore and herbivore species (including wild relatives of livestock) from Africa and elsewhere to the Great Plains. ((Check out a recent interview with a proponent. There’s even a Rewilding Institute now.)) But perhaps Europe might be a better candidate for this kind of thing.
Where the rubber hits the road
The rubber tree comes from Brazil, but natural rubber itself mostly comes from SE Asia plantations these days. One of reasons is the leaf blight fungus, but now comes news of resistant varieties. This may herald a resurgence in climate-friendly natural rubber at the expense of the synthetic kind, which is made from oil. But will that positive effect be negated by increased cutting down of the rainforest to establish new plantations in Brazil?
Bioinformatics projects database
Interested in information on biodiversity information projects?