- How is Europe doing at saving its threatened plants? Paper and website available. How many crop wild relatives are threatened in Europe? I think it should be possible to work it out…
- Bioversity colleagues summarize their work on homegardens.
- Introduced plants can be useful too!
- Soil Association continues to quibble about need to double food supply.
- ICARDA looks for heat-beating wheat.
- “Coconut Biodiversity for Prosperity” meet coming up soon in Kerala. Local press excited.
- Jeremy sets the world straight on Pavlovsk.
- Kew et al. set the world straight on how many plants there are in the world. Jury still out on the number of crop wild relatives.
- Vulnerability of vegetation to climate change varies around the world. Well there’s a thing now. Nice maps.
- If you’re running a livestock cryobank I’ve got the software for you.
Nibbles: Tokyo, Biofuels, Genebank conference, Forestry, Pinus, Hunger, Moringa
- Urban agriculture in Tokyo makes no financial sense. So what?
- Growing biofuels in Andhra Pradesh may make financial sense. Sow what?
- EUCARPIA conference. To Serve and Conserve: genebanks exploring ways to improve service to PGR users and effectiveness of PGR conservation. April 2011.
- Recovering Ethiopia’s forests.
- The wrong kind of pine-nut diversity.
- “We can halve hunger.” IFPRI Director General says how.
- Optimising use of Moringa to purify water.
A reprieve for the cerrado
Stung into action by our forceful prose and righteous indignation, the Brazilian government has decided to save what’s left of the cerrado.
Spatial datasets in the limelight
Two papers describing interesting spatial datasets appeared in my feed reader today. One looks at global landuse change over the past 12,000 years. Here’s the historical course of cropland expansion; there’s a similar set of maps for pastures:
The other paper concentrates on Europe, mapping out the intensity and type of farming, the idea being that not all “cropland” is the same:
In both cases you should be able to get a bigger image by clicking on it. I guess if we’re ever going to be able to investigate the link between agrobiodiversity and livelihoods on a global scale, ((Or even just agrobiodiversity and human population density.)) as people are doing with biodiversity and ecosystem services with poverty, we’re going to have to start with such datasets, enriched with diversity, including genetic diversity, data (or proxies).
How to bring in that diversity data? There are some ideas out there. But there’s a long way to go before we have a global picture of the current spatial distribution of crop diversity.
Nibbles: Yams, Agrobiodiversity, Melons, Cacao, Biotropica, Food, Seed saving, Rice pix, Mongolian livestock, Gums
- IITA set to expand its ability to provide the world with yam diversity.
- “Agricultural biodiversity is essential for farmers as it places them in a better position to manage climate change.” Wait, what?
- An exotic melon is found in Birmingham, UK. But can you make juice from its seeds?
- James dissects the latest genome announcement: cacao. Ignore the press release, just read this.
- Biotropica has a special issue on biodiversity. Even some agrobiodiversity.
- The history of food consumption in the 20th century. Scary reading.
- New Internationalist magazine has a special issue on seed saving! But only a couple of articles available online, alas.
- Wonderful photos of the rice harvest from Flickr.
- Mongolian cashmere can only get more expensive.
- Australians have more to cope with than a back-stabbing prime minister, it seems. Their eucalypts are in trouble. Something to do with fire, maybe.