Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Collecting all the native species in the United States, as well as developing restoration techniques and growing huge amounts of seed will take about 10 years and cost about $500 million, Dr. Havens said — a cost that she argues is well worth it.
That will include a nice batch of crop wild relatives… Incidentally, that $500 million is about twice the value of the endowment that is sometimes mentioned as being necessary to ensure long-term ex situ conservation of crop diversity.
Nigel Maxted has just sent a brief personal take on the recent Kew 250th anniversary celebrations to the Crop Wild Relatives discussion group. Here’s a snippet:
Personally I felt the audience was very receptive to the use and need for CWR conservation, but in my view far too many talks outside of the Plant conservation and agriculture session still failed to make the link between conservation and use. I would judge the gulf between the biodiversity and PGR sectors is still a problem that we need to address if we are to have ‘joined-up’ conservation of all biodiversity.
You can download Nigel’s presentation, “A global approach to crop wild relative conservation: Securing our food and agriculture gene pool.” But watch out, it’s a big PowerPoint file.
You may remember a post a few days ago in which Jeremy announced that Dr José F. M. Valls has won this year’s Meyer Medal. Well, José was briefly at SIRGEALC last week before going off to get his medal, and he gave a great talk on his life’s work on wild peanut conservation and use. Unfortunately, this terrible picture is the best I could do to capture the occasion. ((You can click on it to see it larger, but it won’t help too much.))
Beetles in the Bush hosts the latest edition of Berry go Round, the blog carnival dedicated to plants, and fungi, and things that eat plants and fungi. We found some good stuff there.