Well that was fun. Along with a few others, I live tweeted The Big Nature Debate which took place at the Natural History Museum in London on the afternoon of 7 October. You can get a flavour by checking the naturedb8 hashtag, 1 but I wasn’t very consistent in using it, and neither were the others, so you might need to hunt around for more, untagged tweets. Best point made? Well, apart from the one about weevils being important too (as pollinators of oil palm, among other things), that biodiversity conservation needs to talk to agriculture. I think that came from Professor Jon Hutton, Director of the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre. And vice versa. As pointed out using crop wild relatives as an example by Paul Smith, Director of the Millennium Seed Bank, Kew Royal Botanic Gardens.
FAO puts crop calendars online
An interesting new feature from FAO’s seeds group:
The Crop Calendar provides information about sowing and planting seasons and agronomic practices of the crops grown by farmers in a particular agro-ecological zone. It is a tool developed to assist farmers, extension workers, civil society and the private sector to be able to access and make available quality seeds of specific crop varieties for a particular agro-ecological zone at the appropriate sowing/planting season. It can be used by development-aid workers in the planning and implementation of seed relief and rehabilitation activities following natural or human-led disasters. Furthermore, the Crop Calendar can serve as a quick reference tool in selecting crop varieties to adapt to changing weather patterns accelerated by climate change.
The Crop Calendar database is being maintained at a regional level and is based on inputs from member countries. The Crop Calendar database currently covers 43 African countries and contains information on more than 130 crops, located in 283 agro-ecological zones.
I hope member countries will be encouraged to do what Congo did for sweet potato, which is to record the calendar data separately for improved and local varieties.
Nibbles: ABS, Climate change and crops, Beer proteome, Cattle SNPs, Nepal genebank, Sceletium tortuosum, CBD, Weeds, Vitamin A
- Indian academics voice some reservations about CBD ABS regime. Maybe a multilateral approach would be better?
- CIAT warns about climate change effect on crops. Kenyan farmers know all about that. And Koreans too. Oh, and speaking of kimchi…
- Beer proteome means better beer. Fundamental research indeed.
- Cattle breeds are real. And the gaur?
- Nepal inaugurates genebank.
- San benefit from bioprospecting license for medicinal plant.
- Ahmed Djoghlaf says…
- Weeds? Not weeds. Cities as biodiversity hotspots? Oh I give up.
- Orange cassava due to one amino acid.
Climate change winners and losers in Europe: the story so far
A recent paper in Agricultural Systems looks at what’s happened to the potential yields of eight crops (winter wheat, spring barley, maize, winter rapeseed, potato, sugar beet, pulses and sunflower) in Europe from 1976 to 2005. Italy and central and eastern Europe have been the big losers (left), probably due to higher temperature increases, sometimes in combination with lower radiation values.
And the British Islands have been the big winners (right), due to to longer period during which temperature is optimum for CO2 assimilation, sometimes in combination with higher radiation levels. That, of course, cannot last forever, though.
Nibbles:Collecting missions, Grapes, Beans, Genome, Local markets, Water
- From GBDBH, a light glimmers: browse and search records of crop collecting missions.
- “Variations in early-season temperatures may alter substantially grapevine yield formation.” For Cab Sauv at any rate.
- Mixture of beans as good as resistant variety against anthracnose disease.
- Genome inversion spurs ecotypic differentiation.
- A review of medicinal plant markets.
- Today’s huge global dataset: “threats to human water security and freshwater biodiversity in global river systems.”