- Can cultivated species get their own Red List? Stefano Padulosi asks the tough questions.
- Açaí: could the wonder fruit also be wonderful for forests? CIFOR asks the tough questions.
- And more: You mean you can eat that?
- Horticulture has rock stars? My turn to ask the tough questions.
- Ok, so what US county is “…a hotbed of diversified, small-scale organic, natural processed food production”? Maybe not so tough.
- Will there be a follow-up to Lancet’s 2008 series on malnutrition? That’s an easy one.
- Luigi’s mother-in-law asks: Where can I get my hands on that drought-resistant tea?
- Got any other questions? World Wide Views on Biodiversity wants to hear from you, this Saturday. (Answers too, I suppose.)
IUCN and Microsoft map threats to biodiversity
“We’re building an application that allows people to map those threats spatially,” Joppa explains. “We’re trying to provide a repository of evidence for threats to species.”
Lucas Joppa is talking about a collaboration between Microsoft and IUCN to map threats to biodiversity. Worth keeping an eye on. But I wonder if they’ll consider agrobiodiversity too. If so, we have some ideas here at the blog. Anyway, presumably the thing will link up with GeoCAT in some clever way.
LATER: And also link to this? Or at least suck in the data?
Brainfood: Wild soybean, Leafy vegetables collection gaps, Banana drought tolerance screening, Chinese soybean breeding, Malagasy coffee collections, Bacteria on beans
- Perennial Glycine: A new source of genetic diversity for soybean improvement. The perennial wild species are genetically and geographically distant from the crop, but at least one can be crossed, with some difficulty, and some potentially useful genes have been enticed to make their way into the cultivated genome. To no great effect, but it’s early days yet.
- Genetic resources collections of leafy vegetables (lettuce, spinach, chicory, artichoke, asparagus, lamb’s lettuce, rhubarb and rocket salad): composition and gaps. You can just read the collecting priorities for each genepool, or analyze the data yourself.
- Screening the banana biodiversity for drought tolerance: can an in vitro growth model and proteomics be used as a tool to discover tolerant varieties and understand homeostasis? Maybe.
- Development of yield and some photosynthetic characteristics during 82 years of genetic improvement of soybean genotypes in northeast China. Yield doubled, but at the cost of water use efficiency. Maybe those perennials could help?
- An assessment of the genetic integrity of ex situ germplasm collections of three endangered species of Coffea from Madagascar: implications for the management of field germplasm collections. For 3 wild species, there’s lots of genetic diversity in field genebanks, but also lots of crossing with other species.
- Diversity of culturable bacteria and occurrence of phytopathogenic species in bean seeds (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) preserved in a germplasm bank. “…the fact that potentially phytopathogenic bacteria have been preserved in a genebank should emphasize the importance of rigorous sanitary controls for plant genetic resources.” You think?
Nibbles: IUCN conference tweep, ICARDA move, Adaptation stories, Branding and market chains, Tree farming
- Stefano Padulosi of Bioversity tweets from the IUCN conference in Korea. And here’s another way of following proceedings: The Twitter Hub.
- ICARDA forced to relocate.
- Results of survey of farmer adaptation strategies in East Africa. (And CIFOR has more examples.) So why do they need Climate Analogues then? I mean, given what we know about it and all… Oh come on, it’s not as bad as all that, look they’re even using it in Costa Rica. Nobody likes a whiny user. Ok, ok, fair enough.
- Branding not much use to farmers.
- Kenyan banker agrees with my mother-in-law on the usefulness of trees.
Sorting out climate change signal from noise
David Duthie at UNEP runs a very useful mailing list called Bioplan aimed at, well, biodiversity conservation planners. He’s great at highlighting connections between different news items or scientific papers, and providing pithy summaries of the latest thinking in different areas. That was the case in a recent post on “how a growing body of researchers are beginning to sort … signal from noise” in the geographic responses of species to climate change, “and shape adaptive management strategies that MAY prevent the worst from happening.” Unfortunately, there is no online archive that I can link to, so I’ll just have to cut and paste from his email. Here it is:
1. Yes, they really are ALL moving:
Massachusetts Butterflies Move North as Climate Warms
reporting on:
G.A. Breed. (early online) Climate-driven changes in northeastern US butterfly communities. Nature Climate Change; DOI: 10.1038/nclimate1663 (open access; 4MB PDF)
2. And not all in the same way:
Studies Shed Light On Why Species Stay or Go in Response to Climate Change
reporting on:
Morgan W. Tingley, Michelle S. Koo, Craig Moritz, Andrew C. Rush, Steven R. Beissinger. The push and pull of climate change causes heterogeneous shifts in avian elevational ranges. Global Change Biology, 2012; DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2486.2012.02784.x (subscription required)
T. L. Morelli, A. B. Smith, C. R. Kastely, I. Mastroserio, C. Moritz, S. R. Beissinger. Anthropogenic refugia ameliorate the severe climate-related decline of a montane mammal along its trailing edge. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2012; DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2012.1301 (open access)
3. But existing protected areas can act as “stepping stones” for species on the move:
Protected Areas Allow Wildlife to Spread in Response to Climate Change, Citizen Scientists Reveal
reporting on:
Thomas, C. D. (early online) Protected areas facilitate species’ range expansions. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1210251109 (subscription required)
4. And new approaches to systemic conservation planning can build more resilience around existing protected area systems:
C.R. Groves et al. (2012) Incorporating climate change into systematic conservation planning. Biodiversity and Conservation, 2012 vol. 21(7) pp. 1651-1671 (open access)
The principles of systematic conservation planning are now widely used by governments and non-government organizations alike to develop biodiversity conservation plans for countries, states, regions, and ecoregions. Many of the species and ecosystems these plans were designed to conserve are now being affected by climate change, and there is a critical need to incorporate new and complementary approaches into these plans that will aid species and ecosystems in adjusting to potential climate change impacts. We propose five approaches to climate change adaptation that can be integrated into existing or new biodiversity conservation plans: (1) conserving the geophysical stage, (2) protecting climatic refugia, (3) enhancing regional connectivity, (4) sustaining ecosystem process and function, and (5) capitalizing on opportunities emerging in response to climate change. We discuss both key assumptions behind each approach and the trade-offs involved in using the approach for conservation planning. We also summarize additional data beyond those typically used in systematic conservation plans required to implement these approaches. A major strength of these approaches is that they are largely robust to the uncertainty in how climate impacts may manifest in any given region.
Craig Groves, a stalwart of The Nature Conservancy, AND a BIOPLANNER, co-authored “Designing a Geography of Hope: A Practitioner’s Handbook to Ecoregional Conservation Planning.” (open access)
I just love that phrase: “Designing a Geography of Hope”!
So do I.