Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
The cacao community has a global strategy out for the conservation and sustainable use of cacao genetic resources.
In order to safeguard the security of cacao diversity, on which the world depends for cocoa production now and in the future, and to ensure its accessibility and sustainable use, the Global Strategy has estimated the cost of annual recurrent management activities at 1,832,736 USD.
Doesn’t seem so much to ensure the world doesn’t run out of chocolate, now does it.
The Top 100 Threatened Species list just released by IUCN, including in a nifty online booklet with nice photos, includes two crop wild relatives: Dioscorea strydomiana from South Africa and Lathyrus belinensis from Turkey. The yam is down to 250 plants and is threatened by harvesting, the vetch down to 1,000, with building work encroaching the population. But in both cases, there is seed conserved ex situ. Surely there are some CWRs that are more threatened than that? Maybe even some wild tomatoes.
Cédric Jeanneret has a lot of questions on the IUCN-Microsoft partnership on Red Lists. Here’s a couple to be getting on with:
What and where are Microsoft’s GIS/spatial analysis know-how and capacity? No doubt its Computational Ecology and Environmental Science team could create an excellent geo-analysis tool in no time, but should we expect another, MS-proprietary geo-file standard? Probably not-so-proprietary, since Microsoft and ESRI are long-time partners, and certainly that partnership had something to do with the MS-IUCN collaboration. This then gives some sense to the new partnership. Most certainly a greater part of the SSC experts use ESRI software, so why not deal with ESRI directly and its arcgis.com platform? One reason could be that the ‘Red List’ is bigger than ESRI, so big so that only a corporation like MS could handle the data and queries.
Read them all.
Slideshare is a great resource, but I’m always slightly worried I might be missing something. Take, for example, the presentation on the barriers to adoption by Haven D. Ley, just shared by the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative. In particular, look at the seventh slide. It includes this diagram:
No reference to genebanks? Really? But, who knows, maybe the presenter mentioned the need for an occasional influx of novel diversity, and the best source for that, in their verbal comments on the slide. Or made the point that the diagram is necessarily a simplification. Or even that this is an illustration of how NOT to do breeding. I’d be interested to know what our breeder readers think of this diagram as a representation of their trade.