Where indeed.
Via.
IUCN on Flickr
IUCN has some nice new photos up at Flickr. I don’t really understand the eco-fashion ones, there are no crop wild relatives among the “Celebrating biodiversity” ones, ((LATER: Ah, but they do feature in the list of things why we need biodiversity!)) and, though there is a nod to agriculture in the set on adapting to climate change, the captions could be better. But that’s all just quibbling, and a bit of sour grapes, no doubt. I don’t see us in agricultural biodiversity doing any better.
Nibbles: GIPB, NPGS, Dogs for conservation, Harare gardens, Goat milk value added, Equator Prize, Humanitarian relief, Peruvian maize, Pseudo-cereals, Katine, Vavilov goes web 2.0, Travel, Haggis ban, African road datasets, Dyes, Adaptation pix, Baltic, AnGR, Jatropha
- GIPB revamps its website. Knowledge Resource Centre is ver. 4.0, no less.
- US National Plant Germplasm System explained to Canadians. Why? They have their own!
- Armadillo sniffing dogs.
- More urban farming in Zimbabwe.
- Interesting stuff you can make with goat milk.
- Who do you like for Equator Prize 2010? Avatar? No, wait, that’s something else. Well, actually…
- Nutrition for humanitarian workers.
- Large-eared white maize is ‘cultural heritage’ of Peru. So that’s all good then.
- Minor cereals and a gluten-free diet.
- Wanna talk to Katine? Ask about what the project is doing with/about agrobiodiversity, of course!
- Nikolay tweets!
- Agricultural and other assorted musings along the Mekong. Can’t help thinking that if you somehow aggregated all similar observations and geo-referenced them you’d come up with a pretty interesting picture of agriculture worldwide.
- A blow for Scottish agrobiodiversity and cuisine.
- Digitizing Africa’s roads.
- Natural dyes 101.
- IUCN photos of climate change adaptation. Includes agriculture! Well, sort of.
- Nordic agricultural scientists to discuss climate change adaptation. Grow bananas?
- Breeding Strategies for Sustainable Management of Animal Genetic Resources from FAO. Via.
- ATREE questions Jatropha.
Nibbles: City fish, Phylogenetics course, Andy got a brand new blog, Leather value-adding, Cod, Monastery gardens, Microbial collections, Cassava, Animal genebank, Biofuel
- Learn urban aquaculture.
- Learn phylogenetics online.
- Learn about the CGIAR’s manifesto for agriculture and climate change from Andy’s new blog.
- Learn about the importance of hide processing in East Africa.
- Learn about the latest blow to British cooking.
- Learn about monastic gardening.
- Learn about the USDA’s microbial collections. They’re agrobiodiversity too.
- Learn what is the latest crop to get its genome sequenced.
- Learn about a private livestock genebank in the US.
- Learn about the effect of biofuel crop diversity on insect diversity.
Yasuní National Park disappoints lovers of crop wild relatives
The Yasuní National Park in Ecuador is apparently the mother of all biodiversity hotspots, “home to the most diverse array of plants and animals in South America and possibly the planet.” And not only that, it may actually continue to be so, unlike many other protected areas.
There are hints that the park could have extra conservation value in a warming world. Yadvinder Malhi, an ecologist at Oxford specializing in the Amazon, said that nearly all climate models simulating the impacts of global warming show the area staying wet even as other parts of the vast basin get drier.
Yeah, but has it got any crop wild relatives, I hear you ask. Well, I asked our friend Julian Ramirez at CIAT, who works with Andy Jarvis. Alas, only one species turns up in Yasuní from the genera of the main South America crops for which he has a decent number of geo-referenced observations (Arachis, Solanum, Phaseolus and Manihot): Manihot brachyloba. Andy, who did his PhD in Yasuní, says he also saw wild cacao and pineapples there. No doubt Julian is putting together the data for those genera as we speak.
Yasuní is of course in the Amazonian lowlands. Wild relatives of Phaseolus and Solanum are in other, nearby protected areas in the Ecuadorian Andes. But that’s another story. For this one: thanks, Julian.