- How is Europe doing at saving its threatened plants? Paper and website available. How many crop wild relatives are threatened in Europe? I think it should be possible to work it out…
- Bioversity colleagues summarize their work on homegardens.
- Introduced plants can be useful too!
- Soil Association continues to quibble about need to double food supply.
- ICARDA looks for heat-beating wheat.
- “Coconut Biodiversity for Prosperity” meet coming up soon in Kerala. Local press excited.
- Jeremy sets the world straight on Pavlovsk.
- Kew et al. set the world straight on how many plants there are in the world. Jury still out on the number of crop wild relatives.
- Vulnerability of vegetation to climate change varies around the world. Well there’s a thing now. Nice maps.
- If you’re running a livestock cryobank I’ve got the software for you.
A reprieve for the cerrado
Stung into action by our forceful prose and righteous indignation, the Brazilian government has decided to save what’s left of the cerrado.
Nibbles: Melaku Worede, Musa, Coconut water, Gates outreach, Bolivian food, Ag and health, Climate change, Diet, Macadamias, Maya Nut Institute
- An interview with the legendary Melaku Worede.
- Rwanda has to go from 100 to 30,000 ha of bananas, apparently.
- Coconut water good for athletes. And the rest of us too, actually.
- Gates Foundation launches a “community page.”
- Bolivians going back to their food roots.
- “…better integration of health and agricultural interventions and policy” needed. Seconded.
- “[A] graphical accounting of the limits to what one planet can provide.” Groovy climate change stuff.
- And if that left you gasping for more, here’s “Socioeconomic consequences of climate change in Sub-equatorial Africa related to the agricultural sector”.
- “Mediterranean” diet set for World Heritage Listing. Maybe. Spaniards, Greeks to object?
- Kenya’s macadamia crop threatened, but help is at hand. In other news, Kenya has a macadamia crop.
- Equilibrium goes Nuts.
Nibbles: CGIAR “change”, Cuba, Data, Pavlovsk, Homegardens, Soil bacteria, Thai rice
- GFAR publishes list of Megaprogramme (or whatever they are called) consultations.
- Cuba’s Miscellaneous Crops Under-delegate Rolando Macias Cardenas reports on tomato paste. In other news, Cuba has a Miscellaneous Crops Under-delegate. No, wait, that’s not really news.
- While Sachs et al. moan about better agricultural data, CIAT go out and get it.
- The Pavlovsk TweetMedvedev campaign rolls on.
- “…maximum diversity can be conserved at an intermediate level of income” in Javanese bamboo-tree homegardens.
- Right, so trees “farm” bacteria. What some people will write in a press release.
- Thailand’s rice farmers trying to cope with climate change. Like they have a choice.
Long-term experiments and crop wild relatives
So I was idly reflecting on the recent paper by Magurran et al. in Trends in Ecology & Evolution on long-term datasets for biodiversity monitoring which I Nibbled earlier, then I ran across another paper, and that really got me thinking. When we talk about protected areas, we usually mean national parks and reserves and the like (or at least that’s what I usually mean), but I wonder whether that misses something. I’m thinking here of long-term exclusion experiments, ((Including “accidental” experiments, perhaps.)) such as the one in Kenya that second paper talked about, for example. There must be other such things around the world: long-term experimental areas, rather than legally recognized reserves, but still (somewhat) protected, and with time series of vegetation and floristic data to boot. Is this something that has been looked at, either regionally or on a global scale, in the context of crop wild relatives conservation? Will investigate.