- Catha edulis bad for Yemen economy. Having been waved a gun at by a qat-chewing Somali teenager, I can testify it’s bad for other things as well.
- Amy Goldman on the heirloom tomato.
- Biology Letters special feature on climate change and biodiversity.
- And more on climate change, this time its likely effect on livelihoods.
- All you ever wanted to know about plant genetic resources conservation in Germany.
- “Isn’t it crazy to think that everything we eat or use that comes from plants at one time grew completely wild?” Well, not so much.
- Africa: Atlas of Our Changing Environment. (Watch out, very large file.)
- Another reason not to drink sugary soft drinks: gout. Coconut water anyone?
- Pre-Columbian Chilean chickens could have come from anywhere, not just Polynesia.
- Mapping diseases.
- A 12th century olive genebank in Morocco.
- Traditional Ethiopian barley/wheat mixtures (hanfets) have some advantages over pure stands.
Agrobiodiversity hits the mainstream
Want proof that sustainable agriculture is firmly on the radar of the mainstream press? Newsweek has a piece this week on how Andean potato farmers are adapting to climate change. While Time sings an ode to the American “urban agricultural boom.”
Mangroves all over the place
For some reason, there’s been a spate of mangrove stories lately. First there was a PNAS paper about the value of Mexican mangroves. That’s behind a paywall, but it was enthusiastically picked up, including by National Geographic and SciDevNet. ((Not to mention Kazinform.)) The latter followed-up with a story about mangrove planting not being done right in the Philippines, based on a paper in Wetlands Ecology and Management. That was also widely picked up, and occasionally given a local slant, as for example in Abu Dhabi. Yesterday there was a story from Fiji. And there have been questions in the Pakistani parliament.
Maybe the media interest has to do with the International Wetlands Conference, which just closed in Brazil. Predictably, participants
…warn[ed] against creating energy and food croplands at the expense of natural vegetation and of carelessly allowing agriculture to encroach on wetlands, which causes damage through sediment, fertilizer and pesticide pollution.
But of course there’s a lot of agriculture that takes place within wetlands:
A recent study shows a large wetland in arid northern Nigeria yielded an economic benefit in fish, firewood, cattle grazing lands and natural crop irrigation 30 times greater than the yield of water being diverted from the wetland into a costly irrigation project.
And climate change is expected to have a devastating effect:
According to South African research, an estimated 1 to 2 million rural poor in that country alone could be displaced as wetlands dry up, placing further strain on urban centres to create accommodation and employment.
Nibbles: Food, Organic, Halophyte, Aromatic, Botanical garden, Coffee, Verroa mite, Pastoralists
- What’s good here? I love globalization.
- An organic oasis in Egypt.
- Today’s crop of the future: Salicornia.
- English lavender?
- Florida botanical garden collects plants threatened by climate change.
- “Los Delirios is a blend of Caturra, Typica, and Bourbon beans grown near Esteli, Nicaragua.”
- Fungus to help honey bees fight mites.
- “During our grandfathers’ time there were different types of grasses here, some for the cows and others for the goats and sheep. Now there’s no grass, the land has become barren.”
Ecologists breaking (unwritten) ecological laws
Andy Jarvis, our man with the global insights, sends this despatch:
This article just came out in Science about assisted colonization. ((O. Hoegh-Guldberg, L. Hughes, S. McIntyre, D. B. Lindenmayer, C. Parmesan, H. P. Possingham, C. D. Thomas (2008). ECOLOGY: Assisted Colonization and Rapid Climate Change Science, 321 (5887), 345-346 DOI: 10.1126/science.1157897)) That is the fancy term for moving a population from one place to another. Over the past few years this concept has been gaining ground, especially with the barrage of horror stories about the impacts of climate change on the geographic range of species. The authors propose a decision framework to identify candidate species for translocation (or assisted colonisation as it seems to now be called). The decision framework consists of criteria for threat, feasibility, and cost-benefit. Amazingly, the whole concept of ecological risk is not taken into account in the decision framework. The authors mention it in the text, and sidestep the issue somewhat by saying that these are short distance translocations, but this may not always be the case. With the best of intentions, we’ve had some really great “assisted colonisation” events in the past that have caused ecological disaster. See Australia, Lake Victoria, the Southern US, etc. etc. The list is endless.
Before I go too far, I must step back and state the positive side of this concept. After all, the objective is conservation. Done properly, with sound risk analysis of direct and indirect impacts on ecological communities (and anthropogenic systems, like … errrr… agriculture), assisted colonisation could save species from near certain doom. An innocent way of seeing it is that you are just lending a hand to species who can’t quite migrate as fast as others. If migration rates are lower than the speed of climate change, or a pesky river gets in their way, then ecologists come to the rescue and move you. It’s like helping an old lady across the road.
Avoiding long-distance assisted colonisation is a useful surrogate for “eco-safety” (a new term is born), but I think it is dangerous as many assumptions are being made with that one. Suggested next article: Risk analysis framework for assisted colonisation. Readers get going.
As a side note, and while I am in the mood for inventing new terms, we also need to come up with a name for this kind of conservation. We have in situ, we have ex situ. What would be good for this kind of conservation? Non-situ could well be the case if you don’t assist colonisation, but I can’t think of a good name for populations that are assisted. Anyone fancy a place in the history books by giving this a name? ((I propose neo-situ. Ed.))