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Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Psst, wanna find out about horticultural projects around the world?
View Horticultural Projects in a larger map
Came across two maps of threats to biodiversity today. There’s a great online interactive map of the status of, threats to, and conservation actions in, the forests in the southern US. And UNEP has a map of threats to gorilla habitats and protected areas in eastern Congo. As I say, that’s just what turned up in my feed reader today. Now, tell me, why isn’t there something like this for… I don’t know… wheat? I mean forests are important to health, sure. But so is wheat.
The New Agriculturalist has a focus on biodiversity this month, including the agricultural kind. There’s a piece on the crop wild relatives distribution modeling work of our friend and occasional contributor Andy Jarvis. And a couple of things from my old stomping ground in the Pacific. All well worth a read.
There’s news from Kew that its GIS Unit has an interactive map out looking at the geographic distribution of plant diversity at the genus and family level. Here’s how they did it:
For each genus of flowering plants, distributions were compiled principally from the specimens held in Kew’s Herbarium. In addition, standard reference floras and checklists for each region of the world (as far as possible) were consulted for doubtful distribution records (such as only one or a few specimens of any genus from a particular region, or doubtfully identified specimens). Many hundreds of individual articles were also consulted, and whether or not a genus was native, doubtfully native, doubtfully present or introduced was noted. Only presence has been recorded; regions from which a genus is absent are not listed, and there is no record of abundance, extent of distribution within regions, or numbers of species either of genera or within regions.
It’s nice enough and all, but I don’t really understand it. I mean, why use those funny regions? Why not proper ecoregions? What’s wrong with just using countries? Anyway, it would be interesting to know if something similar is being planned for the plants conserved in the Millennium Seed Bank, which was coincidentally in the news again this week. Or, indeed, with the material conserved by the international genebanks of the CGIAR system, data on which is to be found in the SINGER database.