Category: Genebanks

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Did wild relatives get a boost at Nagoya?

I think I may have Nibbled the fact that IUCN released a few days ago at Nagoya the results of a massive study of the global pattern of threat to vertebrate diversity. Here’s the money map:

Also to coincide with Nagoya, IUCN collaborated with Kew and the Natural History Museum, London on a global analysis of extinction risk for the world’s plants.

And of course, the A-Z Guide of Areas of Biodiversity Importance was launched at a side event at COP 10. The press release is on the UNEP website.

Compare and contrast with this map Julian Ramirez of CIAT has kindly sent me, showing the richness of wild relatives of a dozen or more major crops. Question for anyone who was at Nagoya: were livestock and crop wild relatives discussed during the proceedings?

I ask because in a recent posting on the Crop Wild Relatives discussion group, Nigel Maxted suggests that launching an initiative to “(establish) … a Global Network of CWR Protected Areas is now a real priority, along with systematic ex situ conservation!”

So what happened?

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Old and new Nordic spring wheats side by side

Pictures being worth a thousand words, and all that, here are pictures — moving pictures, no less — of some Swedish wheats that were planted out for regeneration and characterization earlier in 2010.

Thanks Dag for the link. How hard would it be to make links to this sort of thing available from all-knowing databases, I wonder? Dag thanks the film-maker, Axel Diederichsen, for putting the names of the varieties into his description of the film, and suggests adding the accession numbers. If everyone did that, some kind of spider could surely crawl the web looking for, and linking to, any and all mentions of the number, and linking to them. With human curation, of course.

Is that crazy?

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Fruit tree genebank faces the chop

An important field genebank of rare fruit trees faces an uncertain future as a result of financial support. No, not that one. Bioversity International reports that the Pomona Botanical Conservatory in Apulia, Italy, has failed to obtain a much needed grant to support its activities.

And in other threatened genebank news, our friends in the north report a visit from Swedish National TV to the Nordic Genetic Resources Center to cover budget cuts there.

According to our friends, half the staff will lose their jobs at the start of 2011 if the crisis is not resolved, “and the Nordic countries may start to lose the genebank collection of genetic resources carefully preserved during more than three decades”.

How fine that all this should be happening as the world discusses the conservation of biodiversity at Nagoya.