Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
I’ve finally been able to obtain the dataset on which UNESCO’s interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger is based. ((Thanks, Kai.)) In the map below, which you’ll be able to see bigger if you click on it, you can see Chad’s endangered languages (brighter red means more endangered), mashed up with germplasm from Chad listed in Genesys.
Would it be sensible to give particular priority for germplasm collecting to areas where languages are threatened with extinction?
A request from MapSpaM for people to help them in mapping the distribution of cassava cultivation in Africa ((You may remember us mentioning MapSpaM before as part of an ongoing discussion of crop distribution data.)) forced me into some more playing with Google Earth. I just took MapSpaM’s draft cassava map…
…and plonked on top of it the germplasm provenance data from Genesys. Here’s the result (right click to save the kmz file):
Which highlights — not for the first time, but very powerfully — the lack of material from eastern and southern Africa in the international genebanks. It is definitely important to think about safety duplicating national collections from those countries.
Here’s a close-up for West Africa:
Pretty good representation overall, but even here there are some definite gaps. Time to get collecting again in Africa too. Though of course a geographic gap is not necessarily a genetic gap…
Survival International has a new website on Uncontacted Tribes:
More than 100 tribes around the world reject contact with outsiders. This is their story.
Somewhat weirdly, the website includes a map, although it is pointed out that it “won’t help anyone make ‘first contact.’ But it will help to stop oil companies and loggers from invading the lands of uncontacted tribes.”
Be that as it may, I could not resist mashing it up in Google Earth ((And let me take this opportunity of thanking Google for the Pro license.)) with the data in Genesys on the world’s holdings of agrobiodiversity. This is the result for an area comprising the Brazilian state of Rondonia and some surrounding regions.
Not surprisingly, there’s not much in the way of germplasm accessions from the general areas occupied by uncontacted tribes. Oil and logging companies may not be the only things that these tribes should be worried about.