- From guerrilla gardens to guerrilla flowerboxes.
- “Kuwait needs to have a national genetic bank for plants and seeds by using the help of international experts…”
- Restoration of Satoyama and wetlands by local citizens in Japan.
- Lots of variation in salt tolerance among Georgian wild wheats.
Melaku Worede on the Seed Treaty
“Ex-situ gene banks have an important role to play. But we’ve been trying to save seed in gene banks for the last half century, with more failures than successes. To ensure a sustained supply of useful germplasm and a more dynamic system of keeping diversity alive, we must support farmers in maintaining seed in their field. If we lose this living diversity Africa and the world will not be able to adjust to climate change,” Worede said.
Short-haired bumblebee goes home
The bumblebee Bombus subterraneus is extinct in the UK — it was last seen in 1988 at Dungeness nature reserve on the south Kent coast — but has been thriving in New Zealand.
The short-haired bumblebee was exported from the UK to New Zealand on the first refrigerated lamb boats in the late 19th Century to pollinate clover crops.
It has disappeared in Britain (though it apparently is still to be found on the continent) because of “[l]oss of extensive, herb-rich grasslands, especially those containing good stands of plants of the families Lamiaceae and Fabaceae, through agricultural intensification.” But now there’s a plan to set up a captive breeding programme using the expats, with a view to reintroduction, including in restored habitats.
I could not find any information on whether the decline of the short-haired bumblebee affected the pollination of any plant species, or whether the slack has been taken up by other bumblebees. But be that as it may, this is an interesting example of assisted migration, of a sort, though I don’t think climate change has been implicated in the fate of the insect in Britain. It’s also an example of going back to former colonies to look for genetic resources that are no longer to be found in the “mother” country. Like those Hopi peaches of a few days back. Uhm, I feel another post coming on…
Nibbles: CGRFA, Livestock atlas, ITPGRFA, Bighorn, Japan, Wild Europe, Svalbard
- 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?