- Domesticated sheep spread in two waves.
- How IITA helps yam farmers in West Africa.
- “…it is vital that we develop some sort of early warning system that will enable us to take timely action if we see part of the landscape suffering and signs of the loss of species richness.”
- First issue of newsletter on Agricultural Payments for Ecosystem Services online at Ecoagriculture Partners.
- Visit Cairo’s Agricultural Museum. If you think you can take it.
Nibbes: Nettles, Rivers, Rare species, Library, Afghanistan protected area, Nordic-Baltic-Russian collaboration, Photos, Disease
- George Orwell scythes nettles, then seeks uses.
- World’s rivers in trouble. Also other wetlands the world over. CWRs to be affected, along with everything else?
- Let’s not get too hung up about rarity.
- UNESCO launches World Digital Library. Gotta be some agrobiodiversity in there somewhere, surely. Yes indeedy.
- Afghanistan’s first national park has some livestock wild relatives!
- Circum-Baltic collaboration on genetic resources conservation.
- Mongabay.com publishes lots of cool pictures of biodiversity to celebrate Earth Day yesterday. So does The Big Picture, even some vaguely farming ones. And Adam Forbes has just loaded a bunch of photos too. Luigi comments: Why didn’t we do the same for agrobiodiversity?
- Tuberculosis and domestication. Not.
Of blackthorn and cherry plum
Bloody biodiversity. Don’t you hate it? Just when you think you’ve got half an idea of what’s going on, you find there are a whole load of other things you had no idea about.
Oh, I feel your pain, Simon, I really do.
Scientia pro publica
GrrlScientist launched Scientia pro Publica a couple of weeks ago, and yesterday saw the second edition. SPP, to save digits, is a carnival of general science blogging that goes some way to replacing Tangled Bank, which seems to have gone extinct in a burst of random inactivity. As its title proclaims, SPP is Science for the People, and as GrrlScientist, who I guess felt the lack of Tangled Bank more acutely than the rest of us slobs, says, it exists to celebrate and “to promote the value of communicating science, nature and medicine with the public”.
There’s not a whole heap of agricultural stuff in there, apart from our recent post on heirloom tomatoes. I’m not going to whinge about that, as I now realize that we’ve got your all day, every day carnival of agricultural biodiversity right here. That said, there are a couple of posts that interested me. There’s Kelsey’s post on what happens to cigarette butts, ideal fodder for quiet moments in an awkward conversation. And there’s Tim’s post on triage in conservation which — wouldn’t you know it? — has nary a word on agriculture or crop wild relatives. (Oh dear, I seem to have whinged.)
Nibbles: Assisted migration, Livestock and ecosystems, Agrobiodiversity tourism, Earthworms, Fish, Cucurbits
- Assisted location is now managed relocation. So that’s alright then.
- Transhumance is good for ecosystem. Oh, and bison too.
- Geotourism in Yellowstone has a website. Can agroecotourism be far behind? I’m afraid so.
- No relationship between parasite load and genetic diversity in earthworms. Alas.
- “The naming of fish is a nightmare. They have more aliases than Maltese pimps.” Which is why Latin binomials were invented, duh.
- Pix of Colombian cucurbit (and other) diversity.