Category: GIS

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Using the internet for early warning of genetic erosion

Regular readers will recognize this as a bit of a hobbyhorse of mine. Turns out I’m not alone. A guest post over at Resilience Science discusses harnessing ICTs for ecological monitoring.

Can researchers who are interested in ecological monitoring tap into these increased flows of information by “mining” the internet to detect “early-warning” signs that may signal abrupt ecological changes?

Well, if ecological monitoring, why not genetic monitoring? The health community is in the vanguard, and reaping the benefits.

…nowadays, around 60% of all early warnings of emerging epidemic emergencies that reach the WHO come from … ICT tools.

Agrobiodiversity conservation and use also stand to gain immensely, I think. We just need to take that first step.

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Bhutan agricultural statistics go online

Yes, that’s what the news item said, and it got me all excited. So I rushed off to SINGER first to see if there’s any germplasm from that country in the international collections, and if any of that was geo-referenced. And I was happy to find some 30 barleys at ICARDA, strung all along the main road, from east to west.

new-picture-6

And so then I went off to CountrySTAT-Bhutan to see how well this material covered the distribution of the crop. The results were a little weird. This is the distribution of barley cultivation in Bhutan in 2005.

bhutan-barley-20051

As you can see, the crop is concentrated in the west of the country, whereas in 1981, when the ICARDA collection was made, that seemed not to be the case. Ok, things change. The oldest data in CountrySTAT-Bhutan is 1999, but the pattern is the same.

bhutan-barley-19991

Has the distribution of barley in Bhutan really changed so drastically in the past 30 years or so? And if so, what has that done to genetic diversity? Have the landraces formerly found in the east migrated, or are they only to be found in genebanks now?

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Distributed herbarium documentation

Distributed computer projects are taking off in a big way. “Many are run on a volunteer basis, and involve users donating their unused computational power to work on interesting computational problems.” That usually means looking for extraterrestrial life or working out the structure of black holes or proteins while your computer idles away. Herbaria@home is a bit different. When you sign up as a volunteer, you receive scans of herbarium sheets, you digitize the label information, and these data are then added to the herbarium’s information system. Actually, there are other examples of such projects, which use the public’s spare brain-power, as well as their spare computer-power. I wonder if this approach could be used to improve genebank documentation. Perhaps to geo-reference tricky accessions? Or how about to characterize the morphology of different varieties from photos?

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Land sharing or sparing?

That is one of the questions addressed by a paper in Journal of Applied Ecology which looks at the ecogeographic distribution of organic farming in the UK. “Land sparing” means excluding land from intensive agriculture to protect biodiversity. “Land sharing” is a contrasting strategy which would make all agricultural land better for biodiversity. The study recommends

…continuing to use intensive agriculture to meet our food production targets, but using organic farms in suitable areas to provide islands of biodiversity, as well as a smaller amount of food.

So the vote is for land sparing. Ok, fair enough. What gets me, though, is that, as usual, it is only the effect of agriculture on the surrounding wild biodiversity that is being considered. What about the biodiversity that is an integral part of the agricultural system itself? Doesn’t agrobiodiversity count for something in all this?

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Help for coffee farmers in Central America

From Andy Jarvis:

What if major coffee regions in Latin America were to disappear altogether in the next generation? What would that mean for you as a consumer? Or your children? And what about coffee farmers in Latin America? And their children? What will they do if their livelihoods disappear? At CIAT (International Center for Tropical Agriculture), we have been working for years to develop crop targeting tools based on climate scenarios that show how climate change could alter production systems throughout the region in the years to come. We propose to expand our work to generate a range of possible scenarios for changing patterns of land use in Mexico and Central America, and to partner with CRS (Catholic Relief Services) to help coffee farmers develop strategies to more effectively mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change under each one. In collaboration with CRS, we can directly impact 7000 farmers and generate learning that helps hundreds of thousands more.

Like the idea? Then vote for it!