Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
So I was playing around with the agriculture data on WRI’s EarthTrends the other day. Actually it’s mainly — though not entirely — data from FAOStat, and there are the usual provisos about the methodology. 1 But look at what has been happening to turkey numbers in developed countries lately.
Numbers doubled between 2003 and 2004! Is that real? If so, what’s been driving the trend?
DIVERSEEDS is a scientific project supported fully by the European Commission´s 6th framework programme. We are “Networking on conservation and use of plant genetic resources in Europe and Asia.”
And I think we may have mentioned them before. Anyway, the latest news from the network is that they have a DVD out:
This documentary shows why biodiversity is important for agriculture and how it is conserved and used in many different locations in Europe and Asia.
The DVD costs about US$40, but you can get a discount if you order five or more. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t tell you much more about it. But the contents seems to consist of a series of fifteen or so short (average 3 minutes) films on a wide variety of agrobiodiversity conservation and use initiatives, ranging from the Austrian NGO Arche Noah, to the Thai genebank, to crop wild relatives in the Fertile Crescent, to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. I’ll try to get hold of a copy and report.
Kris’s Archaeology Blog at About.com:Archaeology has a challenging quiz about domestication. I got 15/20. You?
And sorry for missing it when it actually came, back in February!
He fundamentally contributed to our present knowledge of cultivated plants’ biodiversity in Cuba, Eastern Europe, Italy, Libya, Oman and Korea. As an enthusiastic researcher heading the Gatersleben Genebank and later heading the Agrobiodiversity Department of Kassel University in Witzenhausen, his scientific work covered a tremendously wide field of research in plant genetic resources, ranging from pollination ecology and taxonomy (e.g. of Aegilops, Agrostemma, Brassica, Datura, Secale, Triticum) to questions of plant domestication, genetic erosion and evaluation, maintenance and utilization of the entire spectrum of plant genetic resources, including underutilized and neglected crops.
Many happy returns! Enjoy your retirement!
The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service has online (and, indeed, downloadable too), interactive, polyclave identification keys for American grasses and legumes, by state. It’s unclear to me from the introduction whether these cover all grasses in each state, or only the ones which occur in wetlands. In any case, they are for testing purposes only at this stage. But the multi-entry keys are much easier and efficient to use than conventional dichotomous keys. And there are a lot of crop wild relatives included (e.g. see Phaseolus in New Mexico in the screenshot thumbnail below). I don’t think the keys have been build using LUCID (at least I don’t see any reference to it), which seems a bit like re-inventing the wheel, but anyway, better keys are always worth having.
