Welcome to all who landed here from Berry Go Round #20, over at the excellent Further Thoughts. And if you’re one of our regular customers, head on over to Ian Ramjohn’s blog for a great botanical roundup, including a couple of examples of agricultural biodiversity.
Taxonomists to keep jobs until 2515
The second edition of Arthur Chapman’s report “Numbers of Living Species in Australia and the World” was launched this week.
The total number of described species in the world is estimated at just under 1,900,000 — well above the 1,786,000 in the previous report that was published in 2006 1. Chapman’s estimate of the total number of species is close to 11 million. A staggering 83% remain undescribed.
And not because taxonomist aren’t beavering away:
About 18,000 new species are being described each year (16,969 in 2006 and 18,516 in 2007). About 75% of the new species described in 2007 were invertebrates, 11% vascular plants and nearly 7% were vertebrates.
That is an impressive feat. But at this rate it will take until 2515 to describe all the species currently alive. Unfortunately, many of them will be extinct by then.
Kew on the tubes
Kew Gardens has a new YouTube channel. Here’s the introductory video on the Millennium Seed Bank. Check out also the Facebook page. And, apparently, a new website is coming very soon. Part of the 250th anniversary hoopla? Whatever the reason, great public awareness work by Kew.
Nibbles: Non-wood forest products, Landraces and climate change, Brewing, IRRI, Agroforestry, Borlaug, Mutant
- New NWFP Digest is out. Bamboo, bamboo and more bamboo. You all have subscribed, right?
- Your indigenous seeds will set you free. Not if you don’t have a breeding programme and decent seed companies they wont. Or not only.
- College students to evaluate hop varieties. What could possibly go wrong?
- “The IRRI is not involved in any projects on land acquisition for rice production, nor do we provide advice on land acquisition.”
- Agroforestry professor interviewed by Mongabay.
- Edwin Price vs Vandana Shiva on Borlaug on Oz radio. Let the games begin.
- Cool chimeric apple.
Animal Breeding and Genomics newsletter out
The newsletter produced by the Animal Breeding and Genomics Centre (ABGC), a joint venture of Wageningen UR Livestock Research and Wageningen University, is unfortunately not available as an RSS feed, but I think it may well be worth subscribing to via email. The latest edition, for example, gives an update on the Dutch Heritage Sheep project, which points out that “[s]pecific equipment for semen collection was prepared in order to get the ram to mount a ewe in heat” and includes a helpful photograph.