The 2010 Biodiversity Indicators Partnership has relaunched its website. Not earthshattering news, I agree, but a good opportunity to remind ourselves that, perhaps surprisingly, the list of indicators includes one on ex situ crop collections and another on genetic diversity of terrestrial domestic animals. There’s also an indicator tracking the contribution of biodiversity to nutrition, and another looking at the area of sustainably managed agricultural ecosystems. All in all, not bad for agrobiodiversity. Must have taken a lot of lobbying, though.
Down with the invader!
Happy International Day for Biological Diversity! This year’s theme: invasives.
Invasive alien species exacerbate poverty and threaten development through their impact on agriculture, forestry, fisheries and natural systems, which are an important basis of peoples’ livelihoods in developing countries. This damage is aggravated by climate change, pollution, habitat loss and human-induced disturbance.
Next year we’ll do something special on this day, we promise…
Nibbles: Biodiversity loss, Mapping, Mongolia, Ag origins, Polynesian voyaging, Hybrid fruits, Apricots, Bedouins, Donkeys, Chile, Cuba
- How should journalists report biodiversity loss?
- Ireland maps its threatened species, including a crop wild relative or two.
- Eat like a nomad.
- Why agriculture was such a bad idea.
- “The heightened voyaging from A.D. 1000 to 1450 in eastern Polynesia was likely prompted by ciguatera fish poisoning.”
- Is Floyd Zaiger the most prolific fruit breeder in the world? Read about his “designer fruits.”
- “It is truly the apricots that have kept me interested and focused at this job for the past 22 years.”
- Jordan’s Bedouins struggling to cope.
- Donkeys running for their lives in Ghana.
- Chile’s winemakers move south.
- The continuing success story that is Cuban urban agriculture.
Nibbles: Pathology, Aquaculture
- Local plant clinics are a hit in Uganda.
- African catfish is a hit in Cuba, kinda.
Press alerted as to importance of agrobiodiversity
USDA had a nice press release out yesterday about the importance of conserving crop diversity. The example used is the Russian wheat aphid threat to the United States back in 1986. But why do this just now? In preparation for the Third Session of the Governing Body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture? But that’s two weeks away. Maybe for the International Day of Biodiversity? That’s still a week away, though. I don’t get it. I like it: the time is always right to bang on about plant genetic resources conservation. But I don’t get it.