Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
We’ve managed to get our sweaty little hands on the volume of abstracts 1 of the Eucarpia To Serve and Conserve conference, which has just ended in Wageningen. No time to digest the contents fully yet, but to stimulate your appetite, here’s part of the abstract of Geoff Hawtin’s paper, which asked: “Whither Genebanks?” Some provocative questions in there.
Plant genetic material stored in gene banks should be screened with future requirements in mind. Additional plant genetic resources — including those from wild relatives of food crops — must be collected and studied because of the risk that they may disappear.
Climate-adapted crops — for example varieties of major cereals that are resistant to heat, drought, submergence and salty water — can be bred. FAO stressed however that this should be done in ways that respect breeders’ and farmers’ rights, in accordance with the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources.
That’s from FAO’s a submission to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change about a week ago. Can’t think how I missed it. Of course, there is some collecting work being planned now on crop wild relatives…
VIR’s Pavlovsk Research Station, a set on Flickr.
Still all to play for at Pavlovsk.
The Plantwise knowledge bank will be a comprehensive global resource bringing together the best worldwide knowledge on crops, pests, diseases and weeds.
Well, it’s not exactly the citizen science advocated by some of our readers, 2 but this is an interesting exercise in a sort of crowdsourcing. One hopes that variety-level information on the crop will be recorded at the same time as all that pest and disease stuff. And that the whole lot won’t be behind some paywall.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfEfxLcgHk4&feature=player_embedded
