The Science Museum in London has launched an interactive map. The data are from the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, as analyzed by the Walker Institute. I like the Hadley Centre’s one-page summary.
Niche modeling and common sense
We have blogged a few times about niche modeling and how to improve it. Below Mohamed Fawzy Farag Nawar briefly highlights what will become a useful resource in this field, Lifemapper (the data for the modeling comes from GBIF), but points out some limitations.
Lifemapper.org is an initiative to implement online some sort of generic model to predict where a species might exists based on where it was collected, or where it was otherwise documented that it lived. Fine. But here is the results of the model on the species Clivipollia pulcher. This is a marine mollusk that was found along the coasts of eastern Australian, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines. You will see on the map of predicted distribution that the model suggests it might be found in various places inland in central Africa and Latin America. That is what you get when essential prior knowledge is not introduced to the model. Something like telling the developer of the model that marine species should be modeled to a different set of environmental data than Worldclim, which should only be used for terrestrial fauna and flora. Agricultural species are included in Lifemapper, though again the predicted distributions will have to be looked at fairly carefully before use.
Nibbles: Glomus, Erosion, Horticulture, Sweet potato, Drought
- Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus spread by human activity related to agriculture.
- UN food security expert says “75 per cent of agro-biodiversity has been lost”. Naughty.
- UC Davis to lead big USAID-funded international horticulture development project.
- Botany Photo of the Day: Vitis labrusca.
- “The connection between a convolvulaceous tuber bearing crop, a folk-blues artist and a cetacean…”
- IWMI maps drought. Globally.
In which our blogger decides not to quibble about the One Acre Fund
The philosophy behind the One Acre Fund is clearly of a piece with that of the Millennium Villages and the Malawi fertilizer subsidy programme: giving farmers seeds, fertilizers, some advice and a market outlet will do wonders for livelihoods. In a way, it’s a no-brainer: of course it will! And it seems churlish and petty and ungenerous to add the canonical “at least for a while” qualifier, and bring up sustainability and resilience and suchlike when lives are at stake, the need urgent, and the amounts of money involved relatively small. So I won’t go down that route. But I will point out, and not for the first time, that if you are going to do something like this, or this, please first have a look at the amount and uniqueness of the agrobiodiversity you may end up displacing. And I’ll also repeat, again not for the first time, that such initiatives are why we need a global early warning system for genetic erosion. It’s easy to start. All we need is a participatory online mapping platform. You can even submit data via SMS these days!
Helping the guarango
And here’s another nice agrobiodiversity video, though not part of the contest Jeremy refers to in the previous post. It’s about the guarango (Prosopis pallida) tree of the Peruvian coast. Once central to pre-Columbian culture for its pods, wood and ecosystem services, it is now “near extinction in the Ica-Nasca region.” But it’s not going down without a fight, and it is getting some help, for example from a Kew reforestation project. Thanks, Charlotte.