Our friend Danny Hunter at the Crop Wild Relatives Group has word of a new Global Trees Campaign to protect stands of wild trees, among them wild pears and apples in the Caucasus. A project officer has provided Danny with a special report.
Diversity rules
Three articles on the benefits of diversity for your delectation this weekend. Evolutionary Applications has a paper suggesting that restoration of degraded landscapes is best done with “high quality and genetically diverse seed to maximize the adaptive potential of restoration efforts to current and future environmental change.” Meanwhile, in The Economist, how structurally complex and diverse betel nut plantations ((Ok, ok, “betel nut.”)) can be almost as good for bird diversity as the surrounding forest, and how it is better for a crop to be attacked by two pests rather than one.
Nibbles: Funding, Cow Gods, Ãœber Bee, Rice, Bushmeat, Oaks
- $50 million for climate change. Must be some for agricultural biodiversity. Via, which has the application forms.
- How the Egyptians came to venerate cattle.
- Building a better bee.
- Official US rice harvest forecasts 20% too high. Chinese comment: “Without rice, even the cleverest housewife cannot cook.”
- How about without bushmeat?
- IUCN lists endangered oaks. Know any ex situ collections? Tell IUCN!
The forest: back to the future
I’ve blogged before about the myth of the pristine forest, at least as it applies to the Amazon, and a long feature in the University of Chicago Magazine entitled Can’t See the Forest for the Trees does a good job of summarizing that argument. But it does a lot more by putting it in a global context. I hadn’t realized that researchers that see the Amazon as a “working landscape” are increasingly finding kindred thinkers in other parts of the world: in the “secret forests” of El Salvador, the greening Sahel, the tea forests of China. There’s a lot of talk nowadays in such circles of the “social life of forests” ((That’s in fact the title of a conference organized in May by the University of Chicago’s Program on the Global Environment.)) and about local communities taking back control, and becoming “gardners of the forests,” in the words of Peter Crane, formerly Director at Kew. Says Chris Reij of the Centre for International Cooperation at the VU University Amsterdam:
“The foresters have the idea that they have to protect trees from farmers. Our own view is that forests have to be protected from foresters.â€
Honeybees no longer pampered on the Pampas
Ranching in South America tends to get a bad press because it is often associated with Amazonian deforestation, but of course there are vast swathes of the continent where it makes good environmental sense, as well as economic. ((For a discussion of the related question of the bad press that pastoralism gets, see this post in CABI’s blog, which coincidentally came out just a few hours after I posted this.)) The Pampas grasslands of Argentina are a case in point. The home of gaucho culture ((Which, incidentally, is not as homogeneous and predictable as one might think.)), the Pampas are undergoing drastic change. The soybean boom is not just having an effect on the livestock industry, but also, perhaps surprisingly, on honeymaking. Much smaller in value, no doubt, than either soybeans or livestock, but these are not times to pass up on diversification.