Our friend, colleague and occasional contributor Andy Jarvis has just won GBIF’s prestigious Ebbe Nielsen Prize for 2009 for “combining biosystematics and biodiversity informatics research in an exciting and novel way”. A lot of his work has been on the spatial analysis of the geographic distributions of crop wild relatives, with a view to developing strategies and priorities for their conservation, in particular in the context of climate change. A lot, but far from all: Andy is nothing if not versatile, and his interests extend to the whole of agrobiodiversity. A recent interview with Andy, and others, tries to answer the question “why maps?”. Congratulations to Andy!
VIR at war
I’m going to have to take back what I said about English Russia. Just a couple of days after it featured old photos of Russian agriculture, today there’s more of agrobiodiversity interest. Sergei Larenkov mashes up images of modern St Petersburg with photos taken during the siege. Below is one of St Isaac’s Square. There are several others. It was a cabbage patch during the war. The building in the middle is — and was — part of the Vavilov Institute.
Compare it with the picture I took recently.
Opposing the Egyptian pig cull
I posted my recent little note about the imminent disappearance of the Egyptian pig landrace called Baladi to DAD-Net, and it has generated quite a bit of feedback. The gist is that nobody thinks the cull is justified, and that conservation measures are urgently needed (freezing sperm and keeping it in liquid nitrogen and freezing or vitrifying embryos at the time of slaughter were mentioned). Especially since, surprisingly, the breed has never been properly characterized. An Egyptian researchers lamented this by saying that
characterization needs commitment and funds which are not readily available even for more economically important livestock species.
So that’s not unlike the case with crops, then. You can sign up to a petition to stop the cull.
Another international day coming up
Don’t make any plans for 18 September: it’s World Bamboo Day. And it’s the climax of the VIII World Bamboo Congress in Thailand, which goes under the title of Bamboo, the Environment and Climate Change this year. If you don’t think bamboo is particularly important, read about the plight of a Bhutanese village. Via the INBAR website, via the new NWFP newsletter.
Nibbles: Adam Forbes, Squash, Native Americans, Gardens, Buffalo, Pastoralism, Primula, IPR
- Global seed searcher Adam Forbes check in.
- Filipinos greet new squashes.
- Smithsonian special feature on the American Indian. Not much agrobiodiversity, but still.
- Reviews of a couple of interesting gardening books.
- Asian Buffalo Congress 2009.
- Policies that work for pastoral environments.
- “Farmers are being encouraged to graze fewer, rarer animals, and that means the fields can sustain traditional wild flowers. It is a sweet-smelling plant and cattle and sheep love to eat it.” It is the cowslip.
- Case studies on intellectual property in agriculture and forestry.