Category: Threats

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The Ojibwa and wild rice

Smithsonian Magazine has a short article, photos and a video online about a Native American tribe called the Ojibwa, who live in northern Minnesota, and their close connection with wild rice, “manoomin,” or Zizania aquatica. 1 We talked about this before. Ricing is central to the Ojibwa’s founding story, and also a welcome source of income (unemployment is at 50%):

The White Earth Land Recovery Project, run by political activist and tribe member Winona LaDuke, was started 18 years ago to preserve the harvest and boost the tribe’s share of the proceeds. It operates a mill on the reservation and markets Native Harvest wild rice to specialty stores around the country (and through nativeharvest.com). Ojibwa wild rice is one of only five U.S. products supported by the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, an international organization based in Italy that aims to preserve traditional or artisan foods.

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Animal Health for the Environment and Development

We sometimes talk about agricultural biodiversity as if there’s a line that separates it from other kinds of — wild — biodiversity, but of course it doesn’t work like that. There are all kinds of intearactions. For example, diseases can move from wild to domesticated species. Given all the zoonotic diseases that have made the news lately, it seems like it would be sensible to look at human, domestic animal and wildlife health together, rather than in isolation from each other. But apparently such an integrated approach is pretty rare. An initiative of the Wildlife Conservation Society is trying to change all that:

…improving livestock health not only improves human nutrition and incomes, but in the case of zoonotic diseases also contributes directly to improved human health. In addition, healthier domestic animals contribute to securing healthier wildlife (and vice versa), decreasing chances of disease transmission at the livestock/wildlife interface. These cross-sectoral benefits are not all “automatic,” but require that explicit linkages be made between improved food security and health and more sustainable environmental stewardship from the household and community levels on up.

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Dragon’s blood set to dry up

Having been involved in the botanical exploration of the Indian Ocean island of Socotra back in the early 90s, and also — more recently — having done some ecological niche modeling, I was fascinated to see these interests coincide in a recent paper in Biological Conservation. Italian and Yemeni researchers 2 have modeled the distribution of the Socotran endemic Dracaena cinnabari, the Dragonblood Tree, to predict what might happen to it with climate change. It’s not good. This flagship species, whose resin has been the source of a dye and medicine since antiquity, is looking at a halving of its potential area of distribution, due to drier conditions, and only a couple of its current localities will fall within what will remain suitable. Fortunately, they are near a protected area, and the authors recommend that its boundaries be expanded to include them.