Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
In Bittersweet, a new column on GlobalPost, Matt McAllester writes about how food connects us and the people who cook it to faraway lands.
Last month he went looking for wild boar meat in Baghdad. Obviously like to set himself ambitious targets, our Matt. Anyway, well worth a read. Unfortunately you can’t subscribe to his stuff alone, but GlobalPost is an excellent general news site.
Annals of Botany have what I think is quite an innovative feature where they ask Prof. John Bryant of the University of Exeter, UK to take “a closer look at some of this month’s Original Articles.” Each issue he picks four of his favourite papers and writes an summary of the work done and the key results, all in a succinct and elegant paragraph. The latest example describes two pieces of work on mechanisms which maintain diversity in ecosystems, allelopathy and herbivory. And an earlier installment highlighted a paper from Probert et al. at Kew which found that the longest-lived seeds are from warm, dry climates. I’ve set up an email alert for Prof. Bryant’s little nuggets, and no doubt I’ll be mentioning them in future.
Shelagh tells us more about the Habitats Directive and CWRs:
You may be interested to know that a few years back I carried out some analysis of the number of CWR included in the annexes of Habitats Directive. The results can be found in Chapter 5 of the text book, Crop Wild Relative Conservation and Use for those that have a copy. I’m not supposed to circulate the pdf but since it may be of interest, I’ve extracted the relevant pages, but note now that I can’t add an attachment here.
Read more here. And here’s the extract: Kell_etal_2008_extract
The Communications Team in the CGIAR Secretariat launched a new blog a few weeks ago called “Rural Climate Exchange: Connecting Agricultural and Environmental Science to the Climate Agenda.” It looks nice. It seems to have all the requisite bells and whistles. You can subscribe to an RSS feed or email notifications. We’ll be keeping an eye on it, and contributing as appropriate. Welcome to the blogosphere, Nathan, Danielle, Amelia et al.!