Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Carnival alert! Oekologie, a blog carnival about, er, ecology, is back after a short break, hosted by Jennifer at Infinite Sphere. Lots (and lots) about birds, but also some aggish posts that joined ours in the section on Conservation and Social Responsibility. To whit:
Our colleagues at the Agrobiodiversity Platform will next week launch an intense debate on how communities make use of agricultural biodiversity to deal with changing climates. But, mindful of their duty not to exacerbate the problem, they’re doing the whole thing online, with a moderated discussion forum. The discussions will take place over about three weeks, with an initial focus on sharing knowledge about what communities are doing, followed by ideas on awareness raising and finally some wrap-up and the preparation of a first-draft position paper.
I know I don’t have time to participate, but I’m sure we’d be willing to host summary reports from the group here.
I have often looked for detailed crop distribution maps for the countries of the former Soviet Union and found these hard to come by. Not any more! There is a fabulous on-line atlas of agriculture in Russia and neighboring countries.
It has descriptions and maps for a 100 crops, including potato and wheat of course, but also lesser known niceties as the Snowball Tree, Sea Bucktorn and Winter Squash. The maps are pretty, here is an example for Siberian Wild Rye (you know, Siberian Black-eyed Susan; Clinelymus sibiricus (L.) Nevski). Better still, they will be available for dowload in GIS format next year.
There are also entries for 540 wild crop relatives and other agriculturally relevant plants, and for pests, diseases and weeds.
Awesome.
Cuts in California state funding have led to the closure of the Genetic Resources Conservation Program at UC Davis. This seems terribly short-sighted of Gov. Schwarzenneger, who is being talked about as a possible Secretary of Energy under Pres. Obama.