Author: Luigi Guarino

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Threats to animal genetic resources being discussed

DAD-Net, which is hosted by the Animal Genetic Resources Group of FAO, is organizing an e-conference “Analysing threats to domestic animal genetic resources.” It will run 4-25 May and…

…[i]nput from the e-conference will be used to fine tune and finalize a document that will be circulated via DAD-Net, and potentially made available to the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.

A background document has been circulated and will form the basis of the discussion. It consists of a summary of responses from 107 subscribers from 55 countries to a questionnaire survey to identify threats to animal genetic resources. The headline finding is that by far the main danger to animal genetic resources worldwide are “economic and market driven threats.” Click on the thumbnail below to see the breakdown by agro-ecological zone.

threats
You know, I don’t recall a similar e-conference ever happening for crops. Why not, I wonder? These animal people are so much more Web 2.0. Anyway, I look forward to blogging about the main findings of the discussion when they come out.

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Tahr protected, but wild carob?

WWF is announcing the establishment of a national park in the United Arab Emirates for the Arabian Tahr. Tahr are wild goats, but I think perhaps it may be pushing it to describe them as livestock wild relatives. Maybe a livestock expert will tell us.

In any case, the Arabian Tahr does share a habitat with at least one crop wild relative, Ceratonia oreothauma ssp. oreothauma. I believe that’s the only other species in the carob genus. I’ve actually collected the damn thing in Oman, and not at all easy it was too. But was an opportunity missed of making this a joint livestock-and-crop-wild-relative protected area?

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More distributed fun

Our loyal reader will know I have a weakness for applications which harness the power of hordes of distributed internet users, especially if they involve mapping. There was the thing about digitizing herbarium sheets. And the thing about mapping photos of tomatoes. 1 And of course there’s the Degree Confluence Project, which I thought I had blogged about but can’t find in our archives, so perhaps I didn’t, but I should.

The latest such project to come to my attention is called ScenicOrNot. The website presents you with a photograph of a location in Britain and you give it marks out of 10 for scenic beauty. Eventually, I suppose, there will be a map of scenic hotspots — and, for that matter, coldspots — but the developers are cagey about exactly why they are doing this. All fun enough, and possibly even useful, though I’m struggling to think of the agrobiodiversity relevance.

The photographs used by ScenicOrNot come from Geograph, which is doing a similar thing to the Degree Confluence Project, but only for Britain rather than the whole world. The idea is to document with a photograph every 1x1km grid square in the country: “8,570 users have contributed 1,267,685 images covering 242,182 grid squares, or 73.0% of the total.” Exploring that incredible resource does turn up some things of agricultural biodiversity interest. Check out, for example, the oast houses of Britain. The Degree Confluence dataset has been used to ground-truth a Global Map of Rainfed Cropland Areas. Not sure if a similar fate awaits the much denser British dataset.