- Stefano Padulosi of Bioversity tweets from the IUCN conference in Korea. And here’s another way of following proceedings: The Twitter Hub.
- ICARDA forced to relocate.
- Results of survey of farmer adaptation strategies in East Africa. (And CIFOR has more examples.) So why do they need Climate Analogues then? I mean, given what we know about it and all… Oh come on, it’s not as bad as all that, look they’re even using it in Costa Rica. Nobody likes a whiny user. Ok, ok, fair enough.
- Branding not much use to farmers.
- Kenyan banker agrees with my mother-in-law on the usefulness of trees.
Sorting out climate change signal from noise
David Duthie at UNEP runs a very useful mailing list called Bioplan aimed at, well, biodiversity conservation planners. He’s great at highlighting connections between different news items or scientific papers, and providing pithy summaries of the latest thinking in different areas. That was the case in a recent post on “how a growing body of researchers are beginning to sort … signal from noise” in the geographic responses of species to climate change, “and shape adaptive management strategies that MAY prevent the worst from happening.” Unfortunately, there is no online archive that I can link to, so I’ll just have to cut and paste from his email. Here it is:
1. Yes, they really are ALL moving:
Massachusetts Butterflies Move North as Climate Warms
reporting on:
G.A. Breed. (early online) Climate-driven changes in northeastern US butterfly communities. Nature Climate Change; DOI: 10.1038/nclimate1663 (open access; 4MB PDF)
2. And not all in the same way:
Studies Shed Light On Why Species Stay or Go in Response to Climate Change
reporting on:
Morgan W. Tingley, Michelle S. Koo, Craig Moritz, Andrew C. Rush, Steven R. Beissinger. The push and pull of climate change causes heterogeneous shifts in avian elevational ranges. Global Change Biology, 2012; DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2486.2012.02784.x (subscription required)
T. L. Morelli, A. B. Smith, C. R. Kastely, I. Mastroserio, C. Moritz, S. R. Beissinger. Anthropogenic refugia ameliorate the severe climate-related decline of a montane mammal along its trailing edge. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2012; DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2012.1301 (open access)
3. But existing protected areas can act as “stepping stones” for species on the move:
Protected Areas Allow Wildlife to Spread in Response to Climate Change, Citizen Scientists Reveal
reporting on:
Thomas, C. D. (early online) Protected areas facilitate species’ range expansions. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1210251109 (subscription required)
4. And new approaches to systemic conservation planning can build more resilience around existing protected area systems:
C.R. Groves et al. (2012) Incorporating climate change into systematic conservation planning. Biodiversity and Conservation, 2012 vol. 21(7) pp. 1651-1671 (open access)
The principles of systematic conservation planning are now widely used by governments and non-government organizations alike to develop biodiversity conservation plans for countries, states, regions, and ecoregions. Many of the species and ecosystems these plans were designed to conserve are now being affected by climate change, and there is a critical need to incorporate new and complementary approaches into these plans that will aid species and ecosystems in adjusting to potential climate change impacts. We propose five approaches to climate change adaptation that can be integrated into existing or new biodiversity conservation plans: (1) conserving the geophysical stage, (2) protecting climatic refugia, (3) enhancing regional connectivity, (4) sustaining ecosystem process and function, and (5) capitalizing on opportunities emerging in response to climate change. We discuss both key assumptions behind each approach and the trade-offs involved in using the approach for conservation planning. We also summarize additional data beyond those typically used in systematic conservation plans required to implement these approaches. A major strength of these approaches is that they are largely robust to the uncertainty in how climate impacts may manifest in any given region.
Craig Groves, a stalwart of The Nature Conservancy, AND a BIOPLANNER, co-authored “Designing a Geography of Hope: A Practitioner’s Handbook to Ecoregional Conservation Planning.” (open access)
I just love that phrase: “Designing a Geography of Hope”!
So do I.
Illustrated catalog of potato varieties launched in Peru
The International Potato Center has been running an Andean Potato of the Day feature on Facebook. And yes, they are potatoes, stop sniggering at the back there. Anyway, they’re really professional photos of often very weird and attractive traditional potato varieties, many of them with extremely weird names, and it made me curious as to what extent all this diversity is in CIP’s genebank. It turns out the photos were taken in 1999-2000 during a field trip into the Andes organized to provide high quality illustrations for the book “La Papa: Tesoro de los Andes.” CIP’s genebank curators were asked to help with the spelling and translation of the local names, but the photographs are of material freshly harvested from farmers’ fields, not the genebank. Most (not all, alas) of the varieties illustrated are in fact in the genebank, as you can check by searching for the local name (as I did for the “Quwi sullu” potato shown here), though it is occasionally tricky to be certain, due to variation in the spelling of the local name. This is another version of the problem we encountered in an earlier post dealing with rice, where it was not possible to be sure of the identity of material used in a particular piece of research because only the local name was quoted, rather than the accession number. Anyway, I bring all this up now because CIP has just announced the publication of an illustrated catalog of new potato varieties for Peru, with the now obligatory shout-out on Facebook. I haven’t seen the catalog yet, but I do hope it includes accession numbers.
Nibbles: Fertilizer tree, Indo-European, Human diversity, European pollinators, DNA data quality, Biodiversity maps, Organizzzzzz, Plantain
- Faidherbia albida gets another push. To quote from the recent Crops for the Future dissection of neglected/underutilized species: if it’s so good, how come it’s not used more?
- The Indo-European roots of names for pulse crops. Not nearly as boring as it sounds. Oh, and since we’re on the subject…
- Human biodiversity files: athleticism, foodism.
- Huge EU project monitors pollinators. What could possibly go wrong?
- Cleaning up DNA Sequence Database Hell.
- Nice biodiversity hotspot maps. No plants. Definitely no agrobiodiversity.
- A philosopher’s take on that organic agriculture meta-analysis.
- Not Musa, but still edible.
Featured: Kasalath rice
Dr Sigrid Heuer of IRRI, the lead author of the rice paper we blogged about a few days back, and which elicited quite some discussion as regards the country of origin of the material identified as having high P use efficiency, has just contributed a long comment.
Thank you very much for the lively discussion on our paper and the origin of Kasalath. I learned a lot in the process and will follow up on this by genotyping the different Kasalath accessions that we have at IRRI and will also ask BRRI to do the same for accessions from Bangladesh.
As you may know from our previous publications on Pup1 (Chin et al 2011 Plant Physiol 156: 1202–1216; Chin et al 2010 Theor Appl Genet 120(6): 1073–1086), we find the tolerant Pup1 haplotype in many stress-adapted varieties of various origins and also in IRRI breeding lines developed for rainfed environments. We mention this in the paper. Whether the Pup1 locus/PSTOL1 has the same origin in all these accessions and whether the gene that we cloned from the one specific Kasalath sample is the “original” gene is not known and might be difficult to determine.
Do read the whole thing. Our thanks to Dr Heuer for taking the time to respond, and for following-up some of the suggestions arising from the discussion.