- The Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture re-launches its website. And also the Global Livestock Production and Health Atlas (GLiPHA). Must be an FAO thing.
- “We are grateful to the governments who have made voluntary contributions to make this possible,” said Dr Shakeel Bhatti, Secretary of the Treaty’s Governing Body.
- Bighorn sheep at risk from climate change, computer says.
- The changing face of Japanese agriculture.
- “We are blurring natural boundaries: forests are no longer forests, meadows are no longer meadows. We have lost sight of eternity and infinity and are destroying nature for future generations.”
- Pope name-checks Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
Eden makes a comeback of sorts
It was over two years ago that we blogged about attempts to bring back Iraq’s southern marshes, and the agriculture they supported. Now, via Wired, there’s evidence from NASA of at least partial success.
A United Nations Environment Program assessment of the Iraq marsh restoration in 2006 concluded that roughly 58 percent of the marsh area present in the mid-1970s had been restored in the sense that standing water was seasonally present and vegetation was reasonably dense.
Here’s what this (partial) reclaiming of the marshes looks like from space:
But serious concerns remain: the water used for reflooding may not be sustainable as the population recovers and expands its agricultural efforts, and the region may have already suffered an irreversible loss of species diversity.
Would be nice to know to what extent traditional agriculture is also coming back. Maybe this could be discerned from the aerial images? What has happened to local landraces in the meantime?
Will climate change make protected areas useless?
Not for birds in Africa, apparently — and surprisingly, at least to me. ((It’s been a week for surprises. A meta-analysis also just out suggested that “recovery is possible and can be rapid for many ecosystems, giving much hope for humankind to transition to sustainable management of global ecosystems.” But that’s another story.)) A recent paper looked at likely turnover of species in Important Bird Areas (IBAs) in Africa under a range of climate change scenarios. The results showed that although there would be significant shifts in the species composition of individual IBAs, overall about 90% of 815 endangered species “are projected to retain suitable habitat by 2085 in at least one IBA where they occur currently.” And some IBAs will become newly suitable for some species. Only a few endangered species will lose all suitable habitat from the IBA network.
Nevertheless, the authors acknowledge the importance of the shifts in species distribution and suggest a number of recommendations. In particular, the results highlight the need for regionally focused management approaches. For example, increasing the number and size of protected areas, providing ‘stepping stones’ between habitats and protected areas and restoring critical types of habitat, as well as ensuring that the current IBA network is adequately protected into the future.
Sensible recommendations, which would apply all the more strongly to any similar network for crops wild relatives, say, which don’t by and large have the mobility of birds. ((Ok, maybe the ones which are bird-dispersed do! And the ones which don’t move around so well could be helped out, of course, although the most recent paper on such “assisted migration” is definitely in the “no” camp.)) We need to carry out a similar resilience study for CWRs in protected areas, I would suggest. But also, do we know how good the IBAs are at capturing CWR diversity? I suspect when people look at CWR distributions in protected areas, it is mainly national parks and the like that they consider, rather than such specialized things as IBAs, but I could be wrong. ((And Nigel and Shelagh will quickly tell me if I am, no doubt.)) Here’s the distribution of IBAs in Africa. I seem to be having a thing about maps of Africa lately.
Crop wild relatives in the spotlight
The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture will be holding the 3rd session of its Governing Body in Tunis next week. If you’re going, let us have your impressions, please.
And watch out for the side event on “Securing Crop Wild Relative Conservation: Lessons Learned from Global Partnership,” organised by Bioversity International and the Food and Agriculture Organization, which will take place in the Salle Carthage 3 of the Hotel Barcelo Carthage Thalasso on 3 June at 18:00. Soft drinks and snacks will be served, I’m reliably informed by our friend Danny, who will be there making sure that order and decorum is maintained.
The side event will highlight the critical importance of crop wild relatives to global food security and the urgency of taking action to ensure their conservation, especially in the context of climate change. The experiences and outputs of the UNEP/GEF supported project, aimed at enhancing conservation and utilization of crop wild relatives, will be described, including the development of national and global information systems and national in situ conservation strategies.
Why biodiversity matters
Shahid Naeem’s ((Professor of Ecology, Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology, Columbia University. See him in action.)) article “Lessons from the Reverse Engineering of Nature” is long, complicated and, in the end, a bit too esoteric for my taste. It also contains a couple of unnecessarily dismissive references to genebanks. But it is worth sticking with for a section which occurs about half way through, and one paragraph in particular.
After describing a number of experiments in which researchers re-created a particular ecosystem, varying only the overall level of biodiversity (this is what he means by reverse engineering nature), Naeem says:
In spite of the limited number of species and tiny numbers of combinations involved, these studies have been stunningly successful at demonstrating that greater diversity means more biomass, more production, greater retention of nutrients, greater resistance to invasive species, greater resistance to the spread of plant pathogens and greater stability.
He goes on to quote a formal meta-analysis, but that succinct summary is definitely worth having to hand the next time someone asks you what species are good for. Naeem is pretty good on the mechanisms too.
Biodiversity loss can affect ecosystem functioning for many reasons, but two keep emerging from the research. First, the more species one removes, the greater the probability that an extraordinarily important species will be lost. But there is a second reason that biodiversity loss reduces ecosystem function: complementarity. The more species you have, the more ways they make use of limited resources such as light, water, nutrients and space.
And what goes for ecosystems goes for agroecosystems, right? Right.