Category: Information

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How to react to emergencies

From early 2000, various agencies and individuals involved in livestock relief work began to question the quality and professionalism of their interventions.

Wow, thanks for sharing. Anyway, out of that crisis of self-esteem was LEGS born, the Livestock Emergency Guidelines and Standards. It’s not immediately clear to me after a brief browse of the website to what extent agrobiodiversity considerations come into these standards and guidelines, but I’ll explore some more and get back to you. Anyone out there aware of a similarly formalized initiative for seeds? It’s not as if guidelines for seed interventions are not needed. But they may be there already for all I know, embedded in the WFP and FAO seed relief playbooks.

LATER: And indeed they are. Good to know. Thanks to Tom Osborn from FAO.

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Nibbles: Educashun, Landscapes, Botany, AnGR, Tourism, Ham museum, Native American seeds, Ancient Egyptian grain storage, Ancient beer

  • Want to teach about agrobiodiversity? Help is at hand.
  • Want to learn about agrobiodiversity? Stay here.
  • Want to know what’s going on in biodiversity conservation at Cambridge? Here’s how. Tell us if agriculture gets a look-in. If it doesn’t, come back here. But I bet there’ll be something about landscapes.
  • What is a landscape? “The answer … differs tremendously depending on the respondent,” it says here. Wow, those Cambridge boffins will be so shocked.
  • Want to know about the plants in that landscape whose definition is so much in the hands of respondents? Most were discovered by just a few botanical superstars. But how many women?
  • And if that landscape is Turkish and there are (is?) livestock in it, this is what you’ll see.
  • Want to tour the world’s top evolution sites? Here’s the first stop. Now, how about crop evolution (and domestication, natch) sites. Like some livestock- and crop-wild-relative-discovered-by-a-botanical-superstar-filled Turkish landscape, perhaps.
  • Or what about sites connected with food production and marketing more generally, for that matter. No, that list would be too long. Interesting, but too long. Would need to prioritize ruthlessly.
  • One thing for certain, though, it should include a couple of community genebanks.
  • Where it is not inconceivable that seeds would be protected following age-old practices. Which may or may not be taught in fancy courses.
  • Oh, and beer.
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Crop wild relatives of the USA

I’ve just come across the Jepson Flora Project, which

brings together all of the floristic references and data of the Jepson Herbarium. Resources of the Flora Project are directly linked the the Consortium of California Herbaria, CalPhotos, the California Native Plant Society, California Exotic Pest Plant Council, USDA-Plants database, and many other external sites. The Friends of the Jepson Herbarium help the Jepson Flora project carry out its work.

It doesn’t look particularly nice, but I do like the idea of aggregating all kinds of information about each taxon, like Helianthus californicus for instance, via the Jepson Online Interchange. From that admittedly ugly page you can dig deeper, and for example get a digest of taxonomic, distribution and phenology information based on specimens from members of the Consortium of California Herbaria. They don’t make it particularly easy for you 1 but you can, wonder of wonders, even export the location data to Google Earth, where you can mess with it as you wish.

I wonder how many other US states have something similar. And whether all their data on crop wild relatives could then automagically be aggregated up to the national level. Colin, are you there?

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A valuable round up on watchamacallits (NUS, orphan crops, development opportunity crops etc etc)

On the Agricultures website our friends Stefano Padulosi and Paul Bordoni have just published a very valuable round-up on what they call “underutilized species”. 2 Valuable especially because it returns to the topic after six more years of research in the field, casting a historical eye over what worked and pointing out that these species — whatever you call them — can offer poor people a diversity of options to improve their lives, provided projects accept that it is complex and needs to be thorough.

The end-result … was very positive … and further confirmed that it is indeed possible to turn underutilized species into an effective instrument of development and improvement of peoples’ livelihood. This work did also demonstrate that the successful promotion of underutilized species needs to be solidly anchored in cultural-sensitive objectives that are fundamental in the sustainability of this work.

There is a lot more useful information in the article and the references it cites for anyone planning to work on underutilized species. That alone makes it worthwhile. More than that, though, it shows the value of returning to a topic after a little while, sharing the lessons learned, and bringing together in one place the many fascinating new activities, operational and planned.

I hope the African orphan crops project will be able to do something similar in six years time?

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Survey on African orphan crops

Danny posted the following recently on the “Biodiversity for Food and Nutrition” Yahoo Group. I couldn’t find it anywhere else online, so he may have got it by email, I’m not sure. He did ask for it to be more widely disseminated, so here goes. We have mentioned the African Orphan Crop Consortium here before, mainly, if memory serves, to question whether sequencing the genome of said crops was necessarily the best way to spend $40 million. But then we would, wouldn’t we.

“The African Orphan Crop (AOC) consortium had a successful launch at the Clinton Global Initiative in September and the Beijing Genomic Institute has already started work on sequencing winter-thorn acacia (Faidherbia albida). 3 After gathering wonderful feedback from our meeting this summer, we are now conducting a survey to guide the next steps of the project. Via the survey, you are invited to contribute your knowledge and opinions to inform the selection process for the first 20-25 crops that the consortium will genetically sequence. We deeply appreciate your willingness to share insights with this project and would encourage you to forward the survey to others in your network who might like to participate.

The results of this survey will be used by the consortium to inform a process for prioritizing which crops will be initially selected for genetic sequencing, assembly, and annotation by the consortium. As discussed this summer, once this information is developed, it will be placed into the public domain, and plant breeding programs will be established to support development of these crops including the training of 750 plant scientists in Africa. Ultimately, we would like to sequence all of the appropriate crops on this list, and we believe that the momentum generated by the first set of sequenced crops will attract additional interest and funding.