Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Crops, livestock, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives, agroecosystems, foodways …
Ian Dawson has a bone to pick with the authors of a study on barley domestication which we included in a recent Brainfood:
The main point is… properly geo-referenced samples give so much more insight in a paper such as this…
The original paper is in PNAS: “Tibet is one of the centers of domestication of cultivated barley.” So maybe it isn’t after all? Let the debate begin.
Richard Hardwick points us to the full text (PDF, 23 pages) of that “[w]eird statement on genetic resources from EU Commission” we mentioned in a recent Nibble.
I think its from the people who promised “to explore the scope for developing a strategy for the conservation of genetic diversity.”
Right. So who’s going to read it for us?
Cindy Cox, one of the authors of the article described in a recent IFPRI article, encourages us to look beyond groundnuts, and trees, in thinking about perenniation.
I admit the first thing I saw in the IFPRI article was the picture and caption and I immediately slapped my forehead (groundnuts, perennials? doh!). Also, it is a shame that most readers seem to stop at trees and think this is yet another agroforestry article. There are indeed three perenniation strategies presented in the article, only one of which includes trees. Yes, trees use water but if you look at the picture in the article, the tree roots are busting their way through a hard soil layer to access resources that the maize roots would never have on their own. And there is no denying the significant increase in maize yields presented in this article due to perennials.
Good advice.
Cédric Jeanneret has a lot of questions on the IUCN-Microsoft partnership on Red Lists. Here’s a couple to be getting on with:
What and where are Microsoft’s GIS/spatial analysis know-how and capacity? No doubt its Computational Ecology and Environmental Science team could create an excellent geo-analysis tool in no time, but should we expect another, MS-proprietary geo-file standard? Probably not-so-proprietary, since Microsoft and ESRI are long-time partners, and certainly that partnership had something to do with the MS-IUCN collaboration. This then gives some sense to the new partnership. Most certainly a greater part of the SSC experts use ESRI software, so why not deal with ESRI directly and its arcgis.com platform? One reason could be that the ‘Red List’ is bigger than ESRI, so big so that only a corporation like MS could handle the data and queries.
Read them all.