- Picture guide to West African plants. Includes agrobiodiversity!
- Iowa State Agronomy podcasts. Some cool stuff. Check out the one on “Modeling Seed Germination Over Time to Decide When to Regenerate Seed Lots in Long-term Storage.”
- A “formal global program to develop subnational agricultural land-use statistics“? Riiiiight.
- GFAR meeting on sustainable use of agrobiodiversity says “[w]e need to initiate solid and inclusive actions to build concerted and practical actions on sustainable use.” Well they do say actions speak louder than words.
- Researcher “trying to remove the perception that hackneys are ‘half-crazed.'” I’d rather pay to save them if they were crazy, but that’s me.
- Romaine: germplasm to breeding lines. But to cultivars? Private sector to pick up the slack.
- Crops not mentioned among species that save our lives.
- Saving sacred groves in Ethiopia. By building pit latrines. Well why not?
- Brazil nut spread by people.
- A trade-off between species and genetic diversity? Say it
ain’t so! - Today’s iconic species threatened by climate change is the baobab.
- An Egyptian archaeobotanical blog.
- Botanic gardens can threaten biodiversity.
- Nature has (or had, it’s a couple months old) a supplement on nutrigenomics.
Seeds in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault…
…by country of origin, on its third birthday.
News on the Desert Research Center genebank
Ismail Abdel Galil (left), founder of the looted Egyptian Deserts Gene Bank, has told SciDev.net that he is hopeful that the EDGB will be able to recover some of the genebank’s material that was duplicated at the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew. Galil confirmed that most of the material was not duplicated, not even at the National Gene Bank in Giza, which was not looted.
SciDev.net’s report, more than three weeks after the news broke, here, adds some information to sketchy details we had before. The looting of the Desert Research Center in Cairo was carried out by “mobs,” while “Bedouin groups in the Sinai region, angered by the Mubarak government’s policies towards them, went on the rampage” and attacked the EGDB. According to Hazem Badr, SciDev.net’s reporter,
DRC chairman Ibrahim M. Nasr … estimated the losses at the facilities in Cairo and North Sinai at around US$1.3 million. That figure does not include the desert plant gene bank, some of which has been irretrievably lost.
Galil, who founded the desert genebank in 1996, had been honoured by Bioversity International as one of the Guardians of Diversity in the Mediterranean at a celebration in Rome in May 2009. ((The photo is from Bioversity.)) Unfortunately the genebank’s “efficient operations and state of the art technology,” cited in the award, were no match for looters.
Nibbles: Lingonberries, Genebank Standards, Genebank, Seed Systems, Chinese drought, Cuba, Mexican bees
- Lingonberries power a trip from moose to mousse, and mush.
- FAO has a draft of updated genebank standards!
- Climate change person visits ICRISAT genebank, is impressed.
- Access to improved seed lauded.
- Yo! Price spike watchers! The Chinese drought thing is complex. Pay yer money. Take yer choice.
- Our friends at DAPA highlight their friends in Cuba: “peasant farmers have been able to boost food production via environmentally friendly methods”.
- Protecting native bee populations in Mexico.
Botanic gardens get the treatment
We probably don’t give botanic gardens the attention they deserve. So it’s a pleasure to point out that Biodiversity and Conservation has a special issue out on Botanic Gardens in the Age of Climate Change, with a focus on Europe. Lots of interesting stuff in there, including from some old friends.
And since we’re on the subject of published papers, I’d like to say what a good idea it is to include an illustration in the abstract of a paper. I had not come across this before I stumbled on the example here on the left in a recent Scientia Horticulturae paper on Citrus phylogeny.