Category: Information

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Nibbles: Maize domestication, Seaweed as food, Holy plants, Pre-Columbian Amazon, Pulses, Myanmar rice, Ghana cassava, Chocolate festivities, Tobacco biofuel, Evidence base, Brazilian agrobiodiversity

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Nibbles: Indian ag, West African rice, Interdependence day, Animal cryo, NASA, Biopiracy?

  • “…nor could they survive during inclement phases of a seasonal climate with a cheery hardiness the way our traditional varieties could.
  • “How does the centrality of rice production mediate social reality among the Jola?”
  • “When we say, ‘As American as apple pie,’ we think of baseball and hot dogs without ever considering not one ingredient in apple pie originates from what we call the United States.”
  • “The absolute minimum we should do is preserve tissues from these animals in such a way they can be thawed and grown again.”
  • “We’re botanists; we’re plant experts. Plus we had this humongous network of students, citizen scientists who were eager to do so much research that scientists at Kennedy simply didn’t have time to do.”
  • “It is essential that all countries join and ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Nagoya Protocol.”
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Plant Conservation and the SDGs

Dr Sarada Krishnan of the Denver Botanic Gardens kindly sent us this summary of the Global Partnership for Plant Conservation’s conference on Plant Conservation and the Sustainable Development Goals, mentioned yesterday on the blog. Many thanks, Sarada. If many readers want more details on one or two topics in particular, we can perhaps ask her for a follow-up.

The conference was attended by 140 delegates from 27 countries. Here is a summary of topics presented at the conference:

  • Botanic gardens can play a big role in conservation of crop wild relatives.
  • Plant conservation needs to have people at its center.
  • Simplify messages to reach various audiences.
  • Economic impact of invasives: the role botanic gardens can play (example of RBG Sydney with Wollemi pine and Phytophthora cinnamomi).
  • Importance of indigenous knowledge to plant conservation.
  • Update to the North American Botanic Gardens Strategy for Plant Conservation in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals.
  • We need to promote more good news (rather than doom and gloom): spread our success stories #EarthOptimism.
  • Kew’s role in supporting the Sustainable Development Goals.
  • Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) implementation and other conservation topics in various countries (Brazil, South Africa, China, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Canada, Ecuador, Azerbaijan).
  • Capacity building (example of the Sud Expert Plantes programme (SEP2D) by France).
  • Access and benefit sharing for seed banking by the Australian Seed Bank Partnership.
  • The US National Seed Strategy developed by 12 US federal agencies.
  • Role of horticulture in plant conservation and lack of capacity in horticultural skills.
  • Conservation genetics tools.

Very intense two days with great variety of topics!

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Plant conservation boffins discuss the Sustainable Development Goals

Things have been a little busy hereabouts, what with one thing and another, so we seem to have neglected to remind our readers of the Global Partnership for Plant Conservation’s conference on Plant Conservation and the Sustainable Development Goals at the Missouri Botanical Garden. Shame on us. Anyway, participants have been quite busy on Twitter, so you can get a flavour of what’s been going on. The focus was on the role of botanical gardens in the conservation of wild plants, but agricultural biodiversity does seem to have featured at least once.

Maybe someone can tell us more on that.