- Coffee: variety or varietal?
- Malloreddus: from Campideno or Campidano?
- Wheat: annual or perennial?
- Landrace conference: to go or not to go?
- Garum: to be or not to be?
- Potato: but blue?
- Microbial collections: to charge or not to charge?
- Agrobiodiversity: use it or lose it?
- Apples: but seedlings?
Nibbles: Genomic taxonomy, AI taxonomy, Apple history, Polo on sago, Quinoa cooking, Super-crap, Funding conservation, Coffee conservation
- Boffins sequence plant in field for real-time identification.
- Boffins decide machines do identification better.
- Boffins trace apple domestication to Silk Road.
- Famous Silk Road traveller on sago.
- Thinking up fun ways of cooking another pretty tasteless staple.
- Did someone mention super-foodszzzzzzz.
- Mongabay: Africa needs creative conservation funding approaches.
- Emily Garthwaite: Hold my latte.
New round of Darwin Initiative open for business
The Darwin Initiative provides grants for projects working to help developing countries meet their objectives under:
- the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)
- the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-sharing (ABS)
- the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA)
- the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES)
The next round of funding is open for applications.
Good luck, everyone.
Saving the world indeed
It all started in a broken down and semi-abandoned research field station in Mexico in 1943.
That would be the CGIAR centres (and their genebanks, of course), the subject of a generous editorial in Nature Plants today.
Mapping “flourishing” genebanks
The Atlas for the End of the World is a collection of maps and infographics covering two important subjects: the first is the amount of protected area in the world’s biodiversity hotspots and how these regions are tracking in regard to meeting 2020 United Nations (Aichi) protected area targets; the second is an assessment of which cities in these hotspots are growing on collision courses with remnant habitat and endangered species.
Nice idea, of course. And given their first aim, as described above, they didn’t really need to do anything on genebanks or botanic gardens. But they did, and here is the resulting map (click to enlarge).
And this is what they say about it:
Even at a glance this map shows the disturbing fact that while the hotspots are being drained of life, small zoological and botanical gardens seem to be flourishing.
Well, I don’t think you can see that, at a glance or otherwise. Plus the choice of genebanks to display is eccentric. And the Vavilov Institute is mislabelled.
Here’s the WIEWS map of genebanks with more than 10,000 accessions.
Can you tell, at a glance, which ones are flourishing?