Bloody biodiversity. Don’t you hate it? Just when you think you’ve got half an idea of what’s going on, you find there are a whole load of other things you had no idea about.
Oh, I feel your pain, Simon, I really do.
Little cemetery on the prairie
Also in The Economist, news that a little patch of prairie has turned up in the middle of urban St Louis, Missouri. It’s in a graveyard in the north of the city.
There could be some crop wild relatives in this 25-acre remnant, I suppose: wild sunflowers, maybe? No word on whether there are any bison there, or whether they will be re-introduced as part of the management plan, which at the moment involves controlled burning and weeding.
Nibbles: Assisted migration, Livestock and ecosystems, Agrobiodiversity tourism, Earthworms, Fish, Cucurbits
- Assisted location is now managed relocation. So that’s alright then.
- Transhumance is good for ecosystem. Oh, and bison too.
- Geotourism in Yellowstone has a website. Can agroecotourism be far behind? I’m afraid so.
- No relationship between parasite load and genetic diversity in earthworms. Alas.
- “The naming of fish is a nightmare. They have more aliases than Maltese pimps.” Which is why Latin binomials were invented, duh.
- Pix of Colombian cucurbit (and other) diversity.
A geographer on crop wild relatives and lots of other things
Our friend and occasional contributor Andy Jarvis was interviewed recently in Nairobi on the occasion of the first Africa Agriculture Geospatial Week. Read all about why he is so “promiscuous.”
GMO introgression risk mapped
Bioversity International’s Gene Flow Risk Assessment of Genetically Engineered Crops project, funded by GTZ and realized in collaboration with CIAT and Universidad del Valle (Cali, Colombia), has got (some of) its products out. The project focused on the “likelihood of gene flow and introgression to crop wild relatives (CWR) and other domesticated species.” A book is coming, but you can see the risk maps for a number of crops online now. And there’s also a bibliography.
LATER: Jeremy points out, correctly, that “see” in the last sentence above is a bit of an overstatement. You need to do a bit more work than is perhaps implied.