African protected areas surveyed

The EU-funded “Assessment of African Protected Areas” is out:

The purpose of the work is to provide to decision makers a regularly updated tool to assess the state of Africa PAs and to prioritize them according to biodiversity values and threats so as to support decision making and fund allocation processes.

It is great stuff: detailed, standardized descriptions of the importance of — and threats faced by — each protected area in Africa. I wonder if something similar will ever be done for agricultural biodiversity. An interesting first step might be to mash these results with those of the recent survey of crop wild relatives in protected areas. Unfortunately, the agrobiodiversity and protected areas communities hardly ever speak to each other.

Imagining the past

And another trifecta to round off the day, this one of stories about the historical remains of agrobiodiversity, in a broad sense.

We start with an article in Britain’s Daily Telegraph about a genetic study of the skulls of a couple of lions from the menagerie which medieval royalty maintained in the Tower of London. It turns out they were Barbary lions from North Africa, now sadly extinct. Ok, they’re not strictly speaking agricultural biodiversity, but it’s a fun story and I couldn’t resist it.

Next there’s news of an excavation in Egypt which revealed the buried remain of donkeys. I think we actually nibbled this a few days ago in another guise, but the NY Times article is worth reading. The find is interesting because although the donkeys were definitely used as pack animals (the evidence is wear and tear on the bones), they didn’t look any different from wild asses — at least as far as their bones are concerned. Certainly they were no smaller, and a rapid reduction in size has been seen as a marker of animal domestication — the domestication syndrome. So, time for a rethink there.

And, finally, the Boston Globe has a piece on an exhibition of Jewish mosaics from Roman North Africa, entitled “Tree of Paradise” because of its depictions of nature’s bounty. Ancient representations of plants and animals are fascinating, because they are really the only way we can know the external phenotype of old, extinct breeds and varieties. There are unfortunately no pictures in the article, and the exhibition website only has one. Pity.

Out and about: Smithfield Horse Market

This just in from our friend and occasional contributor Danny Hunter out and about in Dublin admiring the agricultural biodiversity on show in a local market.

I walked one minute up the road to the Smithfield Horse Market and was surprised at how big a concern it was. There were horses, ponies and donkeys of all sorts. It was chaotic and pretty much unmanaged. Largely run by and catering for the Traveller community. At one stage there was a bare knuckle fist fight between two brothers apparently. If you missed that you could always go to the van selling videos which had a wide range of DVDs of all sorts of family members, friends and foes slugging it out (among the many road races the Travellers organise in various places). Kids as young as 12 years old were buying and selling! While it is always lovely to be around horses and get some nice shots it all seemed a bit brutal and sad. I liked the scene of the guy with crash helmet and shetland pony walking through the market. After a few hours of sweet fresh horse dung I set off on the Luas for the fresh lungs of Bray and did the 10km coast walk to Greystones.

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