Nibbles: Butchered, Drought, Extension, Deforestation, AnGR, Soyabean, Sagittaria, Urban ag, Grasslands

Nibbles: Breeding, Vegetables, Early agriculture, Breeding course, Nabhan, Gardens, Sequencing twice, er no, once.

Nary a drop to drink

The BBC had an interesting series of maps in December last year on the effects of climate change, economic and population growth on per-capita water availability, based on the work of Martina Floerke and colleagues at the University of Kassel in Germany. Here’s the picture for 1961-90. Red is bad.

1961

And here is the 2070s. Click to enlarge.

2070s

Doesn’t look good, particularly for Central and West Asia, and both southern and North Africa. That’s where your drought tolerant crop varieties are going to come in useful, I guess. And not just that. But I don’t understand how Australia gets away with it so lightly.

How fast will this climate change be anyway?

ResearchBlogging.orgWell, in terms of distance along the Earth’s surface, about 400 m per year on average, ranging from 80 m per year in mountainous regions to 1.26 km per year in deserts. That’s according to a new paper in Nature by Loarie et al. ((Loarie, S., Duffy, P., Hamilton, H., Asner, G., Field, C., & Ackerly, D. (2009). The velocity of climate change Nature, 462 (7276), 1052-1055 DOI: 10.1038/nature08649)) Compare that with figures of postglacial migration rates of <100 m per year for some trees. Here’s a map of the speed of temperature change by biome from the Nature paper (click to enlarge).

map

And here’s the “persistence time” for protected areas in different biomes, i.e. the diameter of protected areas divided by the climate velocity.

persistence

The persistence time — which is how long it takes for the current climate to cross a protected area — exceeds 100 years for only about 8% of protected areas. And that, dear reader, is why we need protected areas that are larger and more connected. Oh, and genebanks.