Nibbles: CIAT, Apples, Poverty, Protected areas, Honey, Juniper, Irish oak

  • Learn about CIAT’s reseach via the posters they put on slideshare. Couple on their beans and cassava genebank.
  • Trying to speed up apple breeding.
  • Biodiversity interventions find it difficult to fight poverty. How about agrobiodiversity interventions?
  • More bad news: protected areas don’t work anyway. At least for trees in Burkina Faso.
  • Boffins trying to spot contraband honey. There’s contraband honey?
  • Gin drinkers told to start worrying.
  • Forest of Belfast project to wind up, but not before finding really old oak.

Trouble in St Petersburg

Russian Ministry of Economic Development adopts resolutions destroying the European largest field genebank and replacing it with commercial cottages.

That’s quite a title. It refers to the Vavilov Institute’s Pavlovsk Experiment Station.

The Station was organised in 1926 near St. Petersburg. Being one of the major stations of VIR, it studies perennial grasses and cruciferous tubers cultivated in the Non-Black-Soil area. There are over 3000 accessions of fruit and berry plants maintained in vivo in its gardens. More than 40 of these fruit samples have been commercialized. This station operates an experiment farm, a quarantine nursery and greenhouses.

The article itself piles on the pain. The staff are doing what they can. Strongly worded letters have apparently been written:

The administration of the Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry (VIR) and the staff of Pavlovsk Experiment Station have forwarded open letters to the President of the Russian Federation D.A. Medvedev and the Prime Minister V.V. Putin seeking their support in shielding the world’s heritage against irresponsible acts of certain Russian functionaries.

Our feelers are out. We’ll keep you posted.

Nibbles: Consortium?, Sheep diversity, Sustainable biofuels, Agroforestry, Almonds, Chicken breeding, Restoration, More tree management, Vegetable gardening, Wheat domestication