Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
On slow news days my mind turns to things meta. So here’s a map of our agrobiodiversity blogging. You can get a better, interactive one by clicking “Map” up on the menu bar at the top of the page.
Considering we haven’t been geo-referencing from the beginning, I think that’s not too bad a geographic coverage of the world’s agriculture. A few gaps, though. We’ll see what we can do about that.
Visually, by comparing the map of INDEX2 (Fig. 6) [right] with the one of the distribution of breeds (Fig. 2) [left], it can be seen that the studied breeds seem to be consistently located in regions defined as marginal by the indices.
Well, maybe. Click on the image to see better. But it seems a stretch to me, and the more rigorous logit analysis that the authors subject the data to isn’t exactly overwhelming. If I understand it correctly, the best that a combination of various proxies for marginality can do in predicting the presence of local sheep and goat breeds is 19%. And that’s with breed distribution data which seems to be biased towards marginal areas anyway.
Local sheep and goat breeds are generally argued to be remarkably well adapted to marginal rural areas.
That’s certainly a dominant meta-narrative, and not just for livestock, for agrobiodiversity as a whole. I may even believe it. But not a huge amount of evidence for it here.
More interesting thinking about the sites of variety yield trials from Glenn Hyman over at AGCommons. You’ll remember he posted a map a few weeks back of the distribution of such sites around Africa, categorized according to which crop evaluation network used them. This is part of a Gates Foundation-funded project to develop an online catalog of these places, including their environmental characterization, and eventually with links to the actual evaluation data they were used to obtain over the years. Glenn then posted about how knowledge of conditions at trial sites could be used to identify the best places for participatory/evolutionary breeding work. And now he’s linked to our recent analysis of interdependence among African countries for plant genetic resources under climate change and suggested that it would be interesting to figure out which sites represent future analogs for current climates: “[w]hat are the key sites for evaluating germplasm in view of climate change throughout Africa?” Is this the MacGuffin we need to get genebanks and breeders to talk to each other more?