Wild relatives

September 7, 2012

Geospatial Conservation Assessment Tool put through its paces

A random tweet from Stefano Padulosi at the big IUCN conference in Korea alerted me to the existence of something called GeoCAT. Funny how you can follow a topic assiduously and still miss important stuff and then come across it entirely by chance. Anyway, GeoCAT is an online tool developed by Kew and Vizzuality, with support from IUCN and others, that “performs rapid geospatial analysis for Red List assessment.” ((Bachman S, Moat J, Hill AW, de la Torre J, Scott B “Supporting Red List threat assessments with GeoCAT: geospatial conservation assessment tool.” (2011) In: Smith V, Penev L (Eds) e-Infrastructures for data publishing in biodiversity science. ZooKeys 150: 117–126. (Version BETA). ))

It all starts by providing some species occurrence data. You can import data from GBIF or, interestingly, Flickr. Or you can upload your own data. Or you can add or edit points on the map itself. All three options seem to work fine. Then you have to click on a little button labelled “Enables EOO/AOO.” It took me some time to figure that out. What that does is it uses the occurrence data to calculate two things: Extent of Occurrence (EOO) and Area of Occupancy (AOO). “These two measures are the foundation of the ‘B’ criterion of the IUCN Red List system.” I’ll let Wikipedia define them:

The EOO can best be thought of as the minimum convex polygon encompassing all known normal occurrences of a particular species, and is the measure of range most commonly found in field guides. The AOO is the subset of the EOO where the species actually occurs. In essence, the AOO acknowledges that there are holes in the distribution of a species within its EOO, and attempts to correct for these vacancies. A common way to describe the AOO of a species is to divide the study region into a matrix of cells and record if the species is present in or absent from each cell.

That done, you click on “Print complete report” and that opens another browser tab which has a map of the occurrences, the EOO and AOO figures, and a preliminary assessment of threat, according to the IUCN system. What it doesn’t have, is a reference to what species you’re dealing with, but the thing is still in Beta, they’ll work such things out in due course. You can also download the results for use in Google Earth, from whence I derived the following, for Cicer judaicum, as it happens.

No, I don’t know if that lone record off to the east is valid, but fear not, if you think it’s suspect, you can easily edit it out. Not bad. Not bad at all.

September 7, 2012April 24, 2014

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.

September 7, 2012September 6, 2012

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.

September 3, 2012September 3, 2012

What I read on my summer holidays

Yeah, summer is over and I’m back at work. Maybe you noticed I haven’t contributed much here in the past month or so. Or maybe you didn’t. Jeremy kept up a steady stream of agrobiodiversity nuggets pretty much all through August. But my lack of activity on the blog doesn’t mean I haven’t tried to keep up, as you would know if you followed us on Facebook, Twitter or Scoop.it. Anyway, for those that don’t, and would like to catch up on my summer reading, here is, in nibble form, what caught my eye during the past month or so:

“The potato is a religious commodity in America.” Explaining the governance crisis in the US using the humble spud.
Wait a minute though: “The sizzle seems to be gone from America’s long-term relationship with the potato.” Which apparently means it needs an extreme makeover, colour-wise. For which you’ll need a genebank.
A tree’s leaves can be genetically different from its roots. Does that mean we have to re-think all molecular phylogenies?
And speaking of a tree’s leaves, these ones are a thousand years old and give you a buzz.
A toff with a passion for pigs. P.G. Wodehouse had something to say about this, didn’t he?
Turns out WFP has a podcast. And ICIMOD has an RSS feed.
A mathematician factchecks Michael Pollan.
Pear with me please, while I tell you about another USDA fruit collection.
15 Africa-changing innovations include orange-fleshed sweet potatoes. As if they weren’t there before. Anyway, they were THE story for a couple of weeks in August.
12 food security innovations include increasing crop diversity. With orange-fleshed sweet potatoes?
How to put that banana genome to some use.
Getting the most out of your enumerators.
IUCN’s Conservation Campus. Any ag? And on a similar topic, training materials in anthropology.
Automating conservation assessment of plants. You’ll need provenance data from herbaria such as this one at CIP, of course. Oh, and speaking of CIP, they need a phylogeneticist.
A market opportunity for the mother-in-law?
Measuring the health of the oceans. Hey, but it’s not all bad for fish.
Ten species which rely on ex situ conservation. And why that number will go up. How to pay for it all, though?
Book on the recent history of agricultural research reviewed. I wonder if they looked at the private sector. Because it seems there may be a case to answer.
Another big grant for taxonomic databases. Ah but this is all going to be community-driven.
Looks like this Australian genebank could have done with a decent database, community-driven or not.

August 20, 2012August 20, 2012

Nibbles: Bees, Honey, Sequipedalis, Website, Conference

“Most people are not aware of the fact that 84% of the European crops are partially or entirely dependent on insect pollination.” Right. I could have sworn it was 82%.
That’s not their main concern in Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve in India, where Honey is Life.
I had no idea yardlong bean was really a cowpea. The genes say so.
Crop Wild Relatives & Climate Change, a new website from the Global Crop Diversity Trust, with just the right number of RSS feeds.
And if it’s conference information you’re after, previews from the ASA, CSSA and SSSA Annual meetings:

As ever, if you’re there and want an outlet, we’re here.