Category: Wild relatives

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Protected areas and crop wild relatives: opportunity or dead loss?

Just wanted to point out to everyone that the biodiversity vs agriculture conflict is being played out in the comments to a recent post of ours.

Danny says:

I can’t help but feel we, the agricultural biodiversity community, have failed to tap into the ‘spirit of Nagoya’, and that this has happened in the International Year of Biodiversity (IYB) may well represent a real missed opportunity.

Dave sees that and raises him:

…the only reason the conservationists want agricultural biodiversity is to document key wild relatives in reserves to prop up justifications for the failing system of protected areas.

Jump in, the water’s fine!

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Cowpeas make the news

On the occasion of the World Cowpea Conference 2010 in Dakar, which is going on now and has resulted in some press interest, IITA have published an interview with the manager of their genebank. Which of course maintains the world’s largest cowpea collection on behalf of us all. Many of the points she makes are addressed in the global strategy for conservation and use of cowpea genetic resources, which I believe she’ll be presenting in Dakar. Dominique doesn’t mention core collections, but another IITA article does. We even have the results of a gap analysis for wild Vigna in Africa. And finally, also doing the rounds is a summary of the results of a survey of users of the collection. Though I wouldn’t bet the farm on those cost numbers turning out to be accurate. Do we have any readers in Dakar who’d like to tell us what’s going on?

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Mediterranean hotspots get Nagoya love

It must be the spirit of Nagoya, because following the announcement of publication of a list of threatened plant species from IUCN and Kew, there’s news of a major conservation effort, this one focusing on the Mediterranean.

The areas targeted look to me like they might well have quite a few crop wild relatives. ((Yes, that’s understatement for effect.))

• Southwest Balkans
• Mountains, Plateaus and Wetlands of Algerian Tell and Tunisia
• Atlas Mountains
• Taurus Mountains
• Cyrenaican Peninsula and
• Orontes Valley and Lebanon Mountains ((The historical photo of the cedars of Lebanon is from Oregon State University’s archives.))

There’s more information on the project, including an ” ecosystem profile” and a call for proposals, on the website of the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund.

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Plants in peril

Kew and IUCN made a splash today with the Sampled Red List Index for Plants. A representative sample of 7,000 species of plants was selected from the comprehensive IUCN Red List Index for detailed monitoring. ((We’ll draw a discrete veil over Nature referring to gymnosperms as “seed-bearing plants,” tout court.)) You can contribute to the Sampled Red List in a wiki-like environment, and follow its progress on the inevitable blog. An interactive map allows some basic exploration of the data. The headline number is that 25% of plant species are threatened. There are various crop wild relatives among the 7,000 species, ((Though not Vavilovia.)) so it might be possible to calculate some statistics for that particular category, to complement other efforts.

Photo courtesy of Kew (http://www.flickr.com/photos/kewonflickr/5036067604/)