- Latest news on the bee front ain’t good. Except on Isle of Man.
- IFPRI accused of being industry shills. But where’s the evidence?
- Commentary on Hilary Clinton’s undernutrition speech.
- Monsanto did not donate GMO seed to Haiti. But it was hybrids, so basically a one-off. Better than nothing? Adding insult to injury? I dunno, you decide.
- So apparently we have the unstable margins of chromosomes to thank for beer. I’ll drink to that.
Featured: Wellesbourne cliffhanger
Andrew has a question for the U. of Warwick, and will be writing a strongly worded letter to Britain’s new Prime Minister if he doesn’t get the right answer:
Is the Genetic Resources Unit to be rehoused under the Department of Life Sciences in a new state of the art facility to increase storage capacity to meet the increasing demand to ex situ conserved plant genetic resources (crops, landraces, wild crop relatives) or are seeds and germplasm to be dumped in the department’s basement with little care for its socio-economic and money making value with the addition to jobs being axed in a research area, which struggles to find adequate funding?
Crop genebanks in the Global Biodiversity Outlook
Seed banks play an important role in conserving the diversity of plant species and crop varieties for future generations. Among the most ambitious programmes for ex situ conservation are the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership, initiated by the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and its partners worldwide, which now includes nearly 2 billion seeds from 30,000 wild plant species, mainly from drylands; and the complementary Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which has been constructed in Norway, close to the Arctic Circle, to provide the ultimate safety net against accidental loss of agricultural diversity in traditional gene banks. The vault has capacity to conserve 4.5 million crop seed samples.
That’s from the section on genetic diversity from the CBD/UNEP Global Biodiversity Outlook 3, just out (pp 51-53 of a large pdf). And very welcome it is too.
Some of it is not particularly well done, but one is surprised to see it done at all. It would have been nice to have had more examples of genetic erosion than this estimate for rice in China, for example:
…the number of local rice varieties being cultivated has declined from 46,000 in the 1950s to slightly more than 1,000 in 2006.
And what does this mean exactly? Who cultivates wild relatives of rice?
In some 60 to 70 per cent of the areas where wild relatives of rice used to grow, it is either no longer found or the area devoted to its cultivation has been greatly reduced.
Probably something has been lost in translation. On the positive side of the conservation ledger, there is the assertion that:
For some 200 to 300 crops, it is estimated that over 70% of genetic diversity is already conserved in gene banks, meeting the target set under the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation.
This figure is much quoted, but I’ve never fully understood how it was arrived at.
Anyway, as I say, at least crop diversity and its ex situ conservation is in there. And the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture gets a mention. We should be grateful for that.
Nibbles: Poppies, Breeding, American panmixis, Hemp, Bra, AnGR
- Breeders called on to save key Afghani crop. No, not really.
- GMOs not incompatible with organic, round 2.
- The Columbian Exchange. People though, not crops.
- USDA chief botanist was into Cannabis shock.
- Novel way of growing rice unveiled.
- Two livestock pdfs: What 2010 means for farm animal genetic resources conservation. And a book on European local breeds.
Nibbles: Mapping islands, Palm diversity, Niche models
- A Global Island Database for all you GIS geeks.
- African palms threatened by climate change: sensitive to climate, but constrained in their movement.
- But careful, it is easy to overestimate extinction risk when playing around with climate suitability models.