- Cinderella fruits hit the limelight.
- Deconstructing rainforest shamanism.
- The assisted migration debate rages on.
CWR at Kew celebrations
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.
José Valls talks peanuts
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.))
Berry go Round 21
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.
- Setting seed in synchrony may be a mistake.
- Wild grapes can be delicious … but be careful.
- A rainbow of pumpkins. Jeremy says: “no pigs in sight, thank goodness.”
Mapping threats to crop wild relatives
Our friend Andy Jarvis and co-workers recently published a paper in the Journal for Nature Conservation entitled “Assessment of threats to ecosystems in South America.” Very interesting in its own right, but check out the map below. Andy has very kindly superimposed for us the location of peanut and potato wild relatives on the ecosystem threat map from the paper. A good way to prioritize conservation? You saw it here first.
