Agricultural biodiversity weblogger awarded prize

Our friend, colleague and occasional contributor Andy Jarvis has just won GBIF’s prestigious Ebbe Nielsen Prize for 2009 for “combining biosystematics and biodiversity informatics research in an exciting and novel way”. A lot of his work has been on the spatial analysis of the geographic distributions of crop wild relatives, with a view to developing strategies and priorities for their conservation, in particular in the context of climate change. A lot, but far from all: Andy is nothing if not versatile, and his interests extend to the whole of agrobiodiversity. A recent interview with Andy, and others, tries to answer the question “why maps?”. Congratulations to Andy!

The slow march of domestication

Kris’s Archaeology Blog at About.com has a short post summarizing recent work which suggests that there may have been a gap of a millennium between domestication of, and dependence on, broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) in China — and similar gaps for a number of other crops in different centres of origin.

What this is telling us, is that hunter-gatherers took the initial steps towards farming many generations before their descendants became dependent on domestic crops. Interesting, don’t you think?

Indeed.