Our friend Andy Jarvis and co-workers recently published a paper in the Journal for Nature Conservation entitled “Assessment of threats to ecosystems in South America.” Very interesting in its own right, but check out the map below. Andy has very kindly superimposed for us the location of peanut and potato wild relatives on the ecosystem threat map from the paper. A good way to prioritize conservation? You saw it here first.
Chilly in Chile
I haven’t been posting lately because I’m in Pucon, Chile at the 7th SIRGEALC, and pretty busy networking. That wouldn’t stop me normally, but also the wi-fi has not been entirely reliable, though it seems to be ok now. Anyway, SIRGEALC brings together agrobiodiversity researchers from Latin America and the Caribbean every two years, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world. More later.
How to breed for the future
There’s an interesting discussion going on over at PBForum, an e-mail based forum for plant breeding and related fields managed by GIPB. It started out with a question from a Philippines breeder about how to get climate-ready rice varieties. I was particularly struck by the latest contribution, which basically said that, rather, we should be trying to…
…create climate-change-ready breeding programmes. That is, build in the flexibility to shift relatively quickly to a new climate related breeding objective, once it becomes established in what direction the climate will change and how it will affect crop yield.
What I would add is that such “climate-change-ready breeding programmes” would necessarily include ready access to as wide a range of raw materials as possible, including, crucially, properly evaluated collections of landraces and crop wild relatives conserved in, and readily accessible from, genebanks.
Featured: Models
Dag agrees with Fayaz on the uncritical use of niche modeling:
True! This is an important warning for uncritical use of niche models. The niche model predictions of a species distribution does not intend to imply that the species would necessarily be expected to be found there. The niche model only calculates a signature of the ecological climate for the specific occurrence data used to calibrate and train the model.
There’s a lot more.
Nibbles: Cassava, Success, Fish, Models, Videos, Radio, Grazing
- South Africans produce virus-resistant cassava.
- Success stories in agricultural development documented. Some agrobiodiversity in there.
- Fisheries and food security. And more. And more: why not eat “weedy”fish?
- A crop modeler speaks.
- African agriculture is on youtube, but just barely.
- Forage grasses for beginners. Straight from the grazier’s mouth.