- Dahlias: good to look at, good to eat.
- Why agriculture bypassed herbaceous perennials, until now.
Monitoring plants of “Community interest” in Europe
There’s been an item in the news the last couple of days to the effect that “[a] report by the European Commission shows that habitat and wildlife protection targets across Europe will be missed…” Digging a bit deeper into that seemingly simple statement led me to a hitherto unknown (to me) world of EU rules and regulations and reporting requirements.
Let’s start at the beginning. There’s a thing called the Habitats Directive (1992). This requests all Member States “to monitor habitat types and species considered to be of Community interest.” It’s unclear to me how they were selected (perhaps someone out there can tell us), but these species are listed in various annexes to the Directive, though that sounds more simple than it is:
Where a species appears in this Annex but does not appear in either Annex IV or Annex V, the species name is followed by the symbol (o); where a species which appears in this Annex also appears in Annex V but does not appear in Annex IV, its name is followed by the symbol (V).
Anyway, Article 17 provides for regular reports on implementation of the Directive, and the report “for the period 2001-2006 for the first time includes assessments on the conservation status of the habitat types and species of Community interest.”
The website which houses the Article 17 reports is, well, complicated, but well worth exploring. The most interesting bit from an agrobiodiversity perspective is the page from which you can get species reports. These include all kinds of information about the status of those “species considered to be of Community interest,” country by country (there’s also an overall summary). Some of these species “of interest” are crop wild relatives such as Allium grosii, an endemic to the Balearic Islands (click the map to enlarge it).
There’s a few more CWRs in those annexes, though not all that many. A Hungarian Pyrus, for example. Any chance to get a few more on there? The bureaucratic infrastructure and mechanism for regular monitoring and early(ish) warning of any threats would seem to be well and truly in place, European Union-style.
Federal audit of scientific collections remembers agrobiodiversity
President Bust Bush apparently ordered a review and audit of Federally held scientific collections back in 2005. The report is just out. The article in the Washington Post about this dismisses genebanks in a few words (“rare seeds stockpiled by the Agriculture Department”), but the actual report has a bit more, including a box highlighting the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation at Ft Collins and making a reference to Svalbard (p 23), and a paragraph on GRIN (p 31). I think that’s pretty good going. The recommendations (starting on p 29) are a fun read. They’re directed at scientific collections of all types in the US — of seeds, herbarium specimens, stuffed animals, rock samples etc. But basically, if you applied them to genebanks globally, you wouldn’t go far wrong.
Mapping our blogging
On slow news days my mind turns to things meta. So here’s a map of our agrobiodiversity blogging. You can get a better, interactive one by clicking “Map” up on the menu bar at the top of the page.
Considering we haven’t been geo-referencing from the beginning, I think that’s not too bad a geographic coverage of the world’s agriculture. A few gaps, though. We’ll see what we can do about that.
Featured: Genetic erosion
After some kind words of encouragement for your faithful bloggers, as they plow their lonely furrow, Pablo unleashes hell on the genetic erosion meta-narrative:
I hope we can finally move beyond the unsubstantiated pseudostats on worldwide erosion of crop genetic diversity, more important and easier to quantify would be how much is being used in production systems where and by whom. Also there is the question of whether it is forever lost or can be recovered or expressed in new cultivars and crosses or in new environments.
As we’ve seen, that quantification of diversity in production systems could be done by looking at landrace names. Or could it?